Our Universities: Vocational Education
The idea that all college students are the same or that there is only one way to prepare for a productive work life is harmfully wrong. High school to college to career works for some. High school to work to…
Category Students
Our Universities: It’s Jobs, Stupid
Universities should be sharply focused on academic excellence and helping students develop the power to think. Thinking and doing creates value. And jobs follow like a “shadow on dry thirsty land.” Employment will be a place of refuge for thought…
Our Universities: Academic Market Forces
The marketplace of higher education is special, unique, and provides something unlike any other enterprise. But, it is a marketplace nonetheless. Universities are subsidized by the state and therefore are obliged to respond to the social and economic needs of…
Our Universities: Educating a Workforce
In the best cases, technical education is not just training. In the worst cases, training in literature, history, and mathematics is not always education. Oversimplifications do injustice to both pursuits. “If you want to teach people a new way of…
Our Universities: Choosing A College
It’s the season when many soon-to-be high school graduates seek a place to study. Believe some of what you read, a great deal of what you see, and make sure the selection feels right. Be careful. “There is no such…
Our Universities: Contemplating a Career?
High-schoolers, make your study choices carefully. Look inside your heart, soul and mind: Determine what’s right for you. “We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles rather than by the…
Our Universities: Borders of the Mind
The beauty of American higher education is the coupling of thought and action: Thinking people putting ideas to work make a university strong. It’s the foundation of a free society to boot. But is it a disappearing reality? “You see,…
Our Universities: All That Glitters Is Not Gold
Students and families should understand what is desired from an education. Socially or politically prescribed solutions for personal aspirations don’t work. “Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that…
Our Universities: A Cacophony of Concerns
Increasing college costs and decreasing employment opportunity have produced an avalanche of studies regarding the value of college degrees. Sometimes more information is not better. A “back to basics” understanding would be valuable to all. “Nowadays people know the price…
Our Universities: Degree Production
The number and value of college degrees produced in the U.S. will be a bone of contention for a long time and the marrow of that bone is that the cost of the degree is no longer borne solely by…
Our Universities: Hybridization
Universities will change to meet changing student needs. Some within the higher education establishment fear looming changes. Change should be embraced by them for the opportunity offered to diverse students. “Many of the most powerful forces driving change in higher…
Open Letter to High School Graduates
This was originally published on May 14, 2012. It may be worth a second read. Walter V. Wendler ______________________________________________________ Dear Graduating Senior, I am begging your pardon for a somber reflection amidst the joy of accomplishment: not to be a…
Our Universities: Selecting the Right One
Finding the right college to fit individual needs is critical, and one size does not fit all. Only thoughtful personal consideration should guide decision making. However, some issues cannot be overlooked. “The college search doesn’t have to begin and end…
Our Universities: Demographic Shift
The changing nature of students, their interests and abilities, requires that our universities change too. While they do, we must remember the attributes of learning and insight, and the abilities and skills that make the university valuable to all change…
Our Universities: Strictly Business
Knowing the genuine interests and educational needs of students is good business. Serving those interests well, with energized faculty, serves the institution. That too, is strictly business. “Listen, I want to congratulate you and Macy’s on this wonderful new stunt…
Our Universities: The Morality of Cost and Value
Universities systematically misrepresent the value of a degree. All degrees may have some value, but how much, to whom? University leadership should help students decide what works for them and why. The idea that any degree under any circumstances has…
Our Universities: Spirit and Tradition
Good universities create community. Places of learning create a sense of belonging when they are well led, not necessarily by people in formal leadership positions, but as acts of commitment from a community’s citizens and a deep yearning to connect…
Our Universities: Open Letter to High School Graduates
Dear Graduating Senior, I must beg your pardon for a somber reflection amidst the joy of your accomplishment: not to be a wet rag on the festivities of graduation, but to shine a light on the realities of post-secondary education.…
Our Universities: Passing the Buck
Leadership without spine or vision, subject to political whim, fancy, flirtation, and subjugation, will compromise, and eventually enfeeble, U.S. higher education. To watch it occur, as universities are held up as the panacea for social ills, is reckless beyond measure. Real…
Our Universities: Enough to go Around
The university is a mirror of, or window to, the world. St. Paul suggested to the Church of Corinth that at times we “see through the glass darkly.” Things are not as sharp or bright as they should be. So…
Our Universities: Bread and Circuses
Universities have lost their mission. Education and academic performance take a back seat to reinforcing the inflated self-concept of students and their families. We have reduced admission standards, reduced standards to progress through courses, and reduced standards of performance required…
Our Universities: Traditions
Universities are defined by their traditions. They can take many forms, some positive, and some negative, but all communities have traditions shaped by citizens who reside there, and a university is a community. Traditions cannot be regulated or imposed, but…
Our Universities: Donner Party Politics
Unbridled, ill-conceived, or poorly implemented regulation often creates undesirable outcomes. Legislators refer to such results as unintended consequences. Sometimes, such consequences are the result of well-meant actions, imposed by parties unfamiliar with the underlying complexity of a situation. When assumptions…
Our Universities: Certification
In many cases, a college diploma has come to represent exposure to certain experiences rather than individual learning and accomplishment. Absent gross misconduct, everybody passes. The degree is simply a totem of club membership rather than an indication of a…
Our Universities: Competition
Competition for ideas is unlike competition for anything else. If we compete to harvest the most gold, we find a limited supply. Fastest person, physiology sets in. Universities should compete for ideas, and those ideas will generate new resources. We…
Our Universities: Curiosity
We tend to find what we look for. You know the old expression, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Those students who look for an intellectual challenge find it… most universities willingly oblige them.…
Our University: Marriage
The relationship of a student to the university is a bit like a marriage. The idea of that relationship is shifting as George Bernard Shaw predicted it would. As with marriage, the university experience is becoming a contractual affiliation rather than…
Our Universities: Sowing and Reaping
The best ideas confront common sense with a baseball bat. They defy logic because we cannot see beyond overly simplistic views of how things work. If you give something away it must have little or no value. Right? Wake the…
Our University: Summertime Revisited
As we move past the shortest day of the year, my thoughts turn to the eventual return of languid summer days. This column about how universities could make better use of their facilities and faculty during the summer months first…
Our Universities: Me, Me, Me
Increasing costs, lavish loans, low performance standards, the absence of merit, and a lost sense of mission contribute to the diminishment of the effectiveness of public higher education. But most loathsome and detrimental is an organization hell-bent on deflecting every…
Our Universities: Mission Evolution? Nay. Revolution!
Universities must change dramatically to meet the evolving needs of their students and the workplace. But, in the process, they must not abandon their roots as places that develop the human capacity for thinking and taking action for the betterment…
Our University – Athletic Integrity
Current events related to intercollegiate athletics leads me to post a story this week that was originally published on July 27, 2010. The cost of low integrity programs and poor executive decision making is the highest cost to bear, even…
Our Universities: Luxuries and Necessities
There is real work associated with the purpose of the university. Work focused on changing the way people think, and changing the way a society operates. Work building a productive economy. Work that creates enlightened action. It is never…
Our Universities: Earth and Ether
Universities must change if we are to continue serving our students. Evermore frequently, universities will be called to meet the specific needs of each student in a unique fashion. If it is properly integrated into the curriculum, distance education gives…
Our Universities: I’m Ashamed
Universities, one hopes inadvertently, are training generations to avoid responsibility for their actions. This is shameful. Such training breeds an expectation of entitlement that undermines initiative, industry, courage, self-reliance, community, and discourages students from exercising one of the greatest benefits…
Our Universities: Funding Merit
There is a shameful trend in higher education and other quarters of society that treats success as something to be considered with suspicion. Some accuse The Occupy Wall Street crowd of holding this position, but achievement and greed are not…
Our Universities: Money and the Big Picture
Seventh and final in a series on state funding for higher education Value in higher education will make more thoughtful and careful students out of those in attendance. People will be asking why ever more frequently. Leadership better have good…
Our Universities: Financial Aid and Its Impact on State Support
Third in a series on state funding for higher education Addressing how the Monetary Assistance Program (MAP) is affecting the students of Illinois, the IBHE Task Force observed: The first issue is the increasing demand for financial aid. More students…
Our Universities: Rising Tuition – Causes and Effects
Second in a series on state funding for higher education Historically, while state contributions to the total operating budgets of universities have increased as a percentage of all spending, tuition has remained a roughly stable percentage of all operating costs. …
Our Universities: Community College Bachelor’s Degrees
Bachelor’s degrees at community colleges are not a good idea. Articulated transfer is a better answer but both community colleges and universities must be more responsive to the needs of student and state. Pascarella and Terenzini suggest, in Studying College…
Our Universities: Serving Whom
Universities must change. The culture of college needs to evolve, particularly with regard to “perverse institutional incentives” that reward colleges for enrolling and retaining students rather than for educating them. “It’s a problem when higher education is driven by a…
Our University: Beating High Costs
Who cares about students as higher education becomes big business? The Justice Department plans to intervene in a whistle-blower lawsuit charging that one of the nation’s largest for-profit college companies, the Education Management Corporation, defrauded the government by illegally paying…
Our University: In State Out of State
Costs are always relative and secondary to value. Governments cannot make universities by enactments of laws: Nor corporations by erections of edifices: The church cannot create them under the authority of heaven: The flattering eulogies of orators cannot adorn them…
Our University: Great Expectations
Our University: Great Expectations In a New York Times piece on February 18, 2009, by Max Roosevelt entitled Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes, James Hogge, associate dean of the Peabody School of Education at Vanderbilt University is quoted.…
Our University – Priorities and Product
Universities must compete for students through excellence and quality. There is no substitute for competition in creating excellence, and it should be the highest priority for any institution of higher education. Governments cannot make universities by enactments of laws: Nor…
Our University – Student Leadership – Passion, Pride and Purpose
A shared vision for a university energizes people. Students must be partners in that vision casting process because theirs is the most fundamental experience that defines whether we have succeeded as an educational institution, and, more importantly to institutions in…
Our University – Loyalty
Eighth and final in a series of who our students are and how they perform. Appreciating different perspectives diminishes neither loyalty nor purpose, but enriches both. Diversity of opinion within the framework of loyalty to our free society is not…
Our University – Race, Ethnicity and Other Forces
Our University – Race, Ethnicity and Other Forces Seventh in a series of who our students are and how they perform. The factors that influence ethnic and racial diversity in universities are many: wealth; preparation; ability, whether innate or learned;…
Our University: Transfer Students
Sixth in a series of who our students are and how they perform. Quality transfer students can bring positive characteristics to the university, not the least of which is a willingness to work. Avril Thorne, Professor of Psychology at U.C.…
Our University: High Achieving Students
Fifth in a series of who our students are and how they perform. The role of every professor, in every classroom, guiding every student, is to challenge that student to a level at which he or she has never before…
Our University: Nontraditional Students
Fourth in a series of who our students are and how they perform. The title of an anthology of stories by and about nontraditional students complied by Donna S. Talarico may say it best, and may say it all: Kids,…
Our University: International Students
Third in a series on who our students are and how they perform. International students are a reliable predictor of U.S. institutional success in a global market for higher education. I am not confident that American postsecondary institutions will retain…
Our University: Enrollment and Gender
Second in a series on who our students are and how they perform. Great universities help people come into their own. Intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and moral development is always a personal matter but good learning environments are catalysts for the…
Our University: Its Changing Face
First in a series on who our students are, and how they perform. The precariousness of balancing opportunity, access and excellence will be addressed in the coming weeks as the face of the university intersects the faces of students. An…
Our University – Teaching Controversy
Sixth in a series on teaching excellence Great teaching is almost always accompanied by controversy, if not for the teacher, for the student; if not for the student, for the board; if not for the board, for the general public;…
Our University – Teachers as Masters of Their Own Fate
Fifth in a series on teaching excellence It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul. — William Ernest Henley One of…
Our University – Student Expectations of Teachers
Fourth in a series on teaching excellence Thousands of times during any school day at any university students walk into a classroom, armed with a computer, a cell phone, an iPod, a vision of what they might do for the…
Our University – Reputation by Teaching
Third in a series on teaching excellence Over the past few years there has been incessant talk about university marketing to increase enrollment. There is more competition to be sure. Research university presidents refer to regional universities and community colleges…
Our University – Casting a Vision: Teachers as Leaders
Second in a series on teaching excellence Teaching is leadership. There are many distinctive views of teaching but, in the end, teaching is about leadership. I do not think it possible to find a great leader who is not a…
Our University – Teaching Excellence
First in a series on Teaching Excellence The purpose of any university is to help people change the way they think. For example, a student who wants to be an attorney comes to the university and, in effect, says “I…
Our University – Mission Integrity
Seven in a series on integrity The fundamental purpose of the university, its reason for being, is to change the way people think. This sounds torturous but it is the root of what universities do. In order to fulfill that…
Our University: Fiscal Integrity
Second in a series on integrity. This is not about double dipping as was reported last week in the Seattle Times; lavish trips to distant lands under the guise of recruiting additional students; fancy offices and luxury cars; incessantly increasing…
Our University – Growth and Change
People don’t like the concept of downsizing. A few years ago management experts were talking about “right-sizing” as an alternative concept. Organizations always serve best when they serve most efficiently. One way to create efficiency is to make sure that…
Our University – Unfairness
The world is unfair. People without resources are denied access to higher education. No matter how low tuition is, it is still out of reach for some. Inside Higher Ed ran a story recently about a program at Tulsa Community…
Our University – Lowering Costs and Quality
Community colleges and dual enrollment high school programs are seen as the ticket to reducing costs in higher education. Carefully used they are a means to reduce cost, but they are not round-trip tickets. Cost comparisons for credit hours attained…
Our University – Lying, Cheating, and Stealing
Students in classes at all universities are lied to, cheated and stolen from every day through grade inflation. Recently at Louisiana State University, a faculty member who refused to lie, cheat or steal was removed from her class of biology…
Our University – Summertime
Not one stone will remain unturned in a nationwide effort to reduce operating costs, tuition and fees over the next few years for all public and private universities. American ingenuity coupled with a deep, abiding pragmatism suggests this crisis of…
Our University – Student Work
In a study from the early part of this century, Learning and Earning: Working in College by Orszag and others, it was found that students who work a reasonable number of hours per week while enrolled in college, say 8…
Our University – Completion Rates
A measure of university success in “rankings exercises” such as U.S. News and World Reports, Kiplinger’s, and others has appropriately been the rate at which a student completes college. If a student spends a few years at a university and…
Our University – Coaching
I was reading a piece about the “Big Dance” and how important it is to a university. For the uninitiated few, the Big Dance is the annual NCAA basketball tournament that some feel will boost college enrollments, solve fiscal problems,…
Our University – Discrimination
When selling my house a few years ago, bankers refused to underwrite a loan to an individual because he did not appear to have the ability to carry the note successfully. Too bad there are not more discriminating bankers who,…
Our University – The Right to Fail
Clarion-calls for rights of every stripe fill the air on our university campuses across the nation. This is as it should be. There are those demanding the rights for the pregnant mother, and rights for the unborn, rights for…
Our University – ACT
For many, these three letters may spell something that happens in front of an audience or television camera. For millions of high school graduates seeking entrance to a university, they are the bane of their existence in the transition between…
Our University: Moral, Ethical and Legal Decision Making
In the study of architecture at any university there are always a few courses on professional practice. They are required by accrediting agencies, but that burden is of little consequence. Practitioners want the discipline to flourish; therefore standards of behavior…
Our University – Reverse Transfer
Reverse transfer is the growing phenomenon of students leaving a four-year institution, like our university, and going to community colleges. This is called reverse transfer because; when community colleges were initially established the purpose was for technical training, adult education,…
Our University – Struggle
The struggles of a university are not the subject of these thoughts. That would be too easy. The struggles are many, not unique, frequently self-inflicted, and reflective of the environment. Universities are members of a family of similar institutions. The…
Our University – Reducing Costs for College Students
I have previously commented on the various ways that families can reduce the cost of attending university. In my own case, I attended a community college and completed my AAS degree earning 70 hours… almost all of which transferred to…
Our University – Purpose
St. Paul was a brave man. He summed up the purpose of the Christian Church in ten words uttered to the Church at Corinth: “Be imitators of me, as I also am of Christ.” The simplicity…
Our University and Alcohol Consumption
Any good university is concerned first and foremost, now and always, with academic excellence. That is our purpose. 128 university presidents signed onto The Amethyst Initiative, a recent effort suggesting the drinking age should be lowered to 18. The primary…
Two Sides of the House – Our University
In different settings people use the phrase “two sides of the house”. When you hear this relative to a university the subject is the idea that there are academic issues, and everything else is “the other side of…
Our University – The Core Curriculum
Visiting with parents and prospective students always reinforces what is most important. The Core Curriculum at our university is a very good one, and provides many options for students to experience a range of intellectual exposure to ideas and subjects…
Our University – A Parents View
There are many perspectives that you can take of our university, ways to see it, ways to engage it, ways to experience it. I have had, over the years, a number of opportunities to talk with parents of students. They…
Our University – Graduation
A farmer plants crops. The seasons, and the sun, the rain, the soil, all work in combination to bring forth fruit from sown seed. At this juncture in the university calendar what we do feels a bit like farming…and its harvest time.…
Our University- Some Hints for Students
Recently I was asked to address honors students in Union County regarding their futures. I am taking the liberty of sharing a condensed version of those comments as hints that might be of value to highschoolers who are about to…
Moral Perspective at Our University
Moral perspective is the legitimate work of a university, for without it there is no possibility of intellectual fulfillment, advancement, achievement, or satisfaction. Intellect and morality are like inhaling and exhaling, one without the other is of no real utility. …
Student Work jobs help students succeed
Work is a four letter word, but not the kind our mothers and fathers used to scold us for using. The people of Southern Illinois are not afraid to work. Hard work will always produce results and fruit does not…
The Importance of Excellent Teaching
Over the past few months research, economic development, our library, intercollegiate athletics, graduate study, quality, leadership and resources have been addressed, among a number of other topics. The center of our University, its sole purpose for being though is about…
Campus Life for Students
The ability of our university to reach full potential and to engender in students a concentrated and powerful academic experience rests with the nature of the campus as a place to live, as well as a place to study. Ideally,…
Our Graduate Students
We are conditioned to think “undergraduate” when we hear the words “college student.” When we think of growing our university to more ably serve a greater number of students you can feel the predisposition building, we are thinking of freshman…
Athletics Builds Community
Creating a strong sense of community for students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends is crucial to building a strong university. There are many avenues through which communities are built, but one that is undeniably powerful for public research universities is…
Our University: Stock Certificates
Stock certificates are used to prove partial ownership of a corporation. A bearer’s stock certificate entitles the holder to exercise all legal rights associated with the stock. Holders of stock certificates want the value of the stock to increase thereby…
