Four Ideas for Foundations Thinking About Prize Competitions
Foundation or government funded competitions are drawing more interest as a means to identify, motivate and support innovators tackling important social challenges. Maybe Race to the Top, the Obama...
View ArticleA Post-mortem on a College’s Strategic Plan: 6 Tests for your Plan
Just four years ago, Sweet Briar College adopted a new strategic plan with the desired outcome to build an “enhanced national reputation for vitality, currency and relevance.” The college has become...
View ArticleSeven Attributes of Successful Higher Education Leaders
American higher education faces the most challenging environment across demographic, financial and economic factors in our modern history. No institution can successfully weather these conditions...
View ArticleThe Untold Story behind Sweet Briar’s Financial Problems
Many think that the financial difficulties facing the nearly closed Sweet Briar College are caused by the recent challenge of declining enrollment and higher tuition discounting. But Sweet Briar’s...
View ArticleThe curtain drops on one cycle of innovation: Ashford University closes its...
The closing of Ashford University’s Iowa campus clearly marks the end of one cycle of innovation in higher education. Ashford’s parent, Bridgepoint Education, bought a small Catholic college in...
View ArticleUse model and design thinking to avoid the trap of best practices
In a very rare occurrence, the same news story flashed across the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times and the Washington Post last week. A group of researchers reported that they could...
View ArticleRedesigning America’s Community Colleges: A “Must Read” for All in Higher...
A number of interesting books about innovation in higher education have been published in 2015. Redesigning America’s Community Colleges is a must read for all practitioners in the field. The book is...
View ArticleHow College Works: Higher Education through the Eyes of Students
How College Works shares insights from research based on an unusual perspective in higher education literature – that of the student. Co-authors Chambliss and Takacs candidly observe at the outset...
View ArticleUS News College Rankings Won’t Survive the Next 10 Years
It just hit me this week: the US News college rankings won’t survive the next ten years. Like most people involved in higher education, I realized long ago that the US News rankings don’t live up to...
View ArticleUnpacking the learning environment to increase student success
Building an accurate model of how a college functions is an essential first step to understand how innovation can improve both student and institutional success. The model will expose the obvious –...
View ArticleThe mistake of focusing on what to do without knowing what you are capable of
Higher education faces extraordinary demographic, economic and social pressures that drive many colleges to seek out a bundle of solutions. But focusing solely on what to do without a deep...
View ArticleFive powerful ideas on talent to drive America’s future prosperity
Another book on higher education? Given that the Lumina Foundation is tightly focused on the world of post-secondary education, that’s a logical assumption for readers starting out on America Needs...
View ArticleA New Vision for a Metro Regional Approach to Higher Education
You can easily fill a bookshelf with the new books about the higher education challenge in America. Virtually all share a common focus – the institution. These books seek solutions grounded in...
View ArticleAs higher education unbundles, who will re-bundle?
Unbundling is a hot topic in higher education. There’s a book about it, College Disrupted, by Ryan Craig and The Chronicle of Higher Education started the year with the launch of Re:Learning, an...
View ArticleBetter Selling isn’t Going to Save the Liberal Arts
The liberal arts struggle in a new environment that no longer permits the academy to define relevance by itself. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, society’s bargain with higher education...
View ArticleA “Must Read” Book for Higher Education Leaders — from 1992
Higher education innovators in search of a guide should look back to a 23 year old book whose author was called “one of the most prominent education reformers of the latter half of the 20th century.”...
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