Youngstown State University (YSU) uses the acronym "TRAC" (Target, Resources, Alignment, and Culture) to demonstrate the structure of its strategic planning process as it goes for a comeback in an area already devastated before the Great Recession hit. In this article from Trusteeship, the magazine of the Association of Governing Boards of Colleges and Universities (AGB), YSU board of Trustees chair Scott R.Schulick and YSU president Cynthia E. Anderson, describes that school's strategic plan and planning.

Even before the economic downturn, Youngstown State was experiencing tough financial times. State support had dropped 24 percent from 2001 to 2007, and it has fallen another 14.5 percent, net of stimulus money, since 2007. Having faced those conditions, the hardships that will accompany the end of stimulus funds in FY 2012 are all too real to us.

Fortunately, the board decided a while ago that we needed to re-examine our assumptions about cost, time, resources, planning, budgeting, governance, and institutional success. We were not willing to support a “cut back and hope” approach. We began learning more about effective governance, strategic finance, and what it takes to get through hard times, and we started to make changes.

Trustees and administrators alike wanted a simple approach, recognizing that “simple” is often not “easy.” The simple version of our efforts now is: Decide where the institution needs to be in the future, endorse and support activities that will cause it to get there, align everything we do in that direction, and reorient the culture accordingly. An acronym could be TRAC: Target, Resources, Alignment, and Culture.

AGB [the Association of Governing Boards of Colleges and Universities] launched The Cost Project in 2006 with a generous grant from the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation. This multiyear effort identified effective cost-saving measures being taken by public and private institutions and to stimulate a national dialogue on costs -- on campus and throughout higher education. The Cost Project offered guidance for on-campus discussions of cost containment; made presentations at AGB meetings over the two years of the project's existence; and published a series of publications for boards, policymakers, and administrators. 

Links to download the various PDFs are here:

• Strengthening Board Capacity for Strategic Financial Oversight; 
• Strengthening Board Capacity for Overseeing College Costs;
• What Board Are Doing - And Not Doing - in Reviewing Institutional Costs; and
• a Bibliography of Resources.

The Association of Governing Boards of Colleges and Universities (AGB) has published the results of a study about governing boards and student learning assessment. The following quote is from a Chronicle article about the survey results. You can download the entire report from the AGB: How Boards Oversee Educational Quality. As well, AGB offers the book Making the Grade: How Boards Can Ensure Academic Quality, by Peter Ewell.

The report, "How Boards Oversee Educational Quality: A Report on a Survey on Boards and the Assessment of Student Learning," is based on a survey conducted in November 2009 that asked 1,300 chief academic officers and chairs of board committees on academic affairs how boards oversee academic quality. The response rate was 38 percent, with 28 percent of trustees and 58 percent of chief academic officers participating. Almost one-quarter of the respondents were from public institutions, and three-quarters were from private institutions.

Results of the survey were mixed, Ms. Johnston said. While slightly more than half of respondents said boards spend more time discussing student-learning outcomes now than they did five years ago, 61.5 percent said boards do not spend sufficient time in meetings on the issue. A smaller proportion—38.5 percent—said enough time was spent on the subject in board meetings.

"There is plenty of room for improvement," Ms. Johnston said

 

Must-read: Get it while it's hot.

The Institute for Effective Governance of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) has published a new, 20-page guide for trustees on how to strategically consider cost-cutting measures. Planners need to download and read this free PDF document so they know what it is their boards may be reading and learning from. This is a really a nice, compact overview of many planning issues which interrelate and should be integrated.

BE EMPOWERED. Remember that trustees are fiduciaries. Students, parents, stakeholders, and—for public universities—taxpayers depend on your vigi- lance and firmness. Trustees mustn’t be pressured by the invocation of “board discipline” or “board unity” into voting against their principles or conscience. It is not an act of courage to raise tuition. Trustees should be willing to close or consolidate programs, when appropriate. They should demand approval authority for significant expenditures, insisting on information in the planning stages and in time for rigorous review.

Beware of building and maintenance projects broken into multiple small units, masking large expenditures beneath seemingly routine activity. Think long and hard before entering into a contract—as some boards have—with a search firm that provides liberal expense allowances, and compensation that might approach the first-year salary of the CEO.

 

Nonmembers of AGB can no longer access the entire contents of this great magazine. Here is the current Table of Contents, though. (PDF) The lead article in the current, July/August 2009 issue is titled "The Gremlins of Governance: by Richard Chait, and its description reads: "Many college boards wrestle with 'three gremlins of governance.' None haunts every campus to the same degree, and yet all are familiar and problematic." Other articles of interest in this issue include: "Your Institution in a Global Economy" by William Freund; "Getting By Isn't Good Enough for Higher Education" by Geanie Morrison and Denise Merrill; and "Presidential Transition Teams: Fostering a Collaborative Process," by Rochard B. Artman and Mark Franz.