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A study of how money is spent at three different liberal arts colleges. The title link, abnove, takes you to the Inside Highezr Ed story about it. Here is a PDF of the full report. 

The three (kept anonymous in the study to encourage full release of data) are similar in their size (1,560 to 1,648 enrollments), mission, academic offerings, the breadth of student activities and athletics, and loyal alumni. Students at all three institutions say that they picked them for their personalized approach to education and close contact with faculty members. Students give all three institutions high marks. (Lapovsky consults with colleges on their financial strategies; she said only one of the three colleges is a client.)

But the three institutions are also very different: in what they charge students, in their expectations of faculty, in their support for student activities, and in their admissions competitiveness."

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This is a must-read. Kevin Kiley thinks and writes well, and there is a great deal in this piece of interest and value to those who plan for the future of higher education. 

What are they thinking, over there where the purse strings are? Here’s what:

Public university employees can expect two things from their universities over the next few years: new programs with an emphasis on increasing tuition revenues, and a whole host of “operational efficiency” initiatives designed to get more bang for each buck.

Much of the focus here at the annual meeting of the National Association of College and University Business Officers has been on how public universities, particularly large research institutions, can change their underlying financial models to accommodate a "new normal” of decreased state appropriations and increased emphasis on tuition revenue, while dealing with increase political pressure to constrain tuition prices.

“If we are going to change how we deliver higher education, it is going to require new ways of thinking,” said Elson Floyd, president of Washington State University, at a session entitled “The Changing Financial Model of Public Universities.”

These just a couple of the issues Kiley identifies and writes about in his excellent coverage of NACUBO’s annual meeting.

You may not have yet read this Planning for Higher Education article from October 2010, so we've posted it here for you, and added this link to an experimental SCUP beta semantic analysis of the article, by Michael Rudden of DiMella Schaffer. Scroll down past the image to see a few bullets from the analysis.

Enjoy! And please share with campus colleagues. They don't often get to see what's in SCUP's journal. Thanks. 

P.S. Note this related SCUP workshop on July 23, near Washington, DC., Capital Projects in a Campus Environment: Organizing and Running a Successful Project Team.

• A review of ongoing campus facilities planning projects, coupled with a review of more than 30 recent campus master planning requests for proposals and the relevant literature, indicates that colleges and universities are finding innovative ways to do more with less in response to this challenging economic environment.
• By integrating their facilities planning with current strategic, academic, and financial plans-a key tenet of the Society for College and University Planning's publication A Guide to Planning for Change (Norris and Poulton 2008)-these institutions are better positioned to proactively evaluate and respond to economic challenges and turn them into opportunities.
• Integrating education technology planning with academic, financial, and facilities planning enables colleges and universities to explore and evaluate the potential impact of alternative pedagogical and technological approaches to delivering educational content.
• These distressed properties are being acquired by nearby institutions that plan to convert them (in some cases in partnership with developers) into, respectively, a hub for a new research venture, a technology education center, continuing education classrooms, a branch-campus expansion, an administrative office building, and short-term "swing space" with parking during campus renovation.
• These strategies include deferring or downsizing planned construction projects, using existing instructional space more intensively, reducing facilities operating costs by closing facilities, improving campus sustainability, and reducing information technology (IT) expenses.

You can read the original article, MIT Borrows for the Long Run, in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The following is a new kind of SCUP Summary of the article. Please let us know your thoughts, terry.calhoun@scup.org, about this kind of summary.

betaSCUP Observations

betaSCUP Summary

betaSCUP Key Terms Map

One of the many good things about the society's annual conference is the opportunity to learn from recipients of SCUP's awards, either in formal professional development sessions or more informal settings.

The SCUP's 2011 Excellence Award recipients have been announced. Congratulations to you all.

We're taking this opportunity to once more bring out information about the 2010 recipients, via SCUP's 2010 Tribute to Excellence newspaper. It is a useful resource that some may overlook, as are the web pages about the recipients. 

Enjoy this succinct, two-page summary of a concurrent session from SCUP's 2010 annual conference. You'll be reading a 50-page set of such summaries that until very recently were only available to SCUP members and others who attended SCUP-45 in 2010. We've left the page open for you to "How Do Smart Meters Make a University More Intelligent?" Just click on the image below.

With the help of SmartSynch, the University of Mississippi (UM, or Ole Miss) has embarked on an ambitious energy-management pilot. SmartMeters transmit data on individual buildings’ real-time energy consumption, providing analysis capability that is yielding granular understanding of buildings’ efficiency levels and occupants’ utilization habits. Social media is being used to disseminate the data transparently, engaging the campus community. Financial reward programs will drive deeper engagement and more behavior change. Dashboards will facilitate comparisons and analysis, with the insights leveraged to inform policy decisions and intelligent building design. The program’s educational and societal value will be compounded when graduates spread its philosophy and practices far and wide.

 What? Isn't it SCUP–46 that's coming in July, near Washington, DC?

Yep. But we've brought out three of the concurrent sessions from last year to remind you, once again, of the great quality of concurrent sessions at SCUP's annual conference that is higher education's premier planning event. This year it's "Integrated Solutions: How & Now." Click on the banner, above, for more. Register now!

• Paul E. Lingenfelter, President, State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO), "The Knowledge Economy Has Arrived: Now What Do We Do?"
• George Pernsteiner, Chancellor, Oregon University System, "Are We Wasting a Percfectly Good Crisis?"
• Peter Smith, Senior Vice President of Academic Strategies and Development, Kaplan Higher Education, "The New Ecology of Learning in the 21st Century"

Enjoy these extracted SCUP-45 executive summaries using our interactive PDF functionality, below. Now iPad compatible!

Consider visiting and contributing to SCUP's LinkedIn discussion about if and how college and university campuses may be inventorying and valuing their trees, and how integrated that is to master planning and overall planning work. We're looking for people to share current best practices.

It turns out that a campus tree has more value, and more kinds of value, than most people would think. A 2006 study of the value of New York City's tree inventory is one of a number of such studies, reflecting a growing number of institutional entities which consider trees to have both capital and operational value. If your campus is planning in an integrated way, in fact, it makes good sense to understand your tree inventory and its value to the institution.

• The article linked-to here, mentions i-Tree, a free software suite that lets people managing tree inventories to do so while taking many important variables into account.
• If you have an interest in campus heritage landscapes, you should visit SCUP's Campus Heritage Planning Network where, among other resources, there are several reports on campus-wide heritage landscape planning.

Trees provide solar reflection for energy savings, clean air pollutants, and intercept water to reduce stress on storm water runoff. New York figured that measuring the value of its 600,000 trees in this way results in a savings for the city of nearly $120 per tree, annually. Figure in aesthetics and things like property value, public health (visible trees reduce the length of hospital stays), stress, and so forth, and another $90 per tree per year in value brings the total to $210 per tree.

In New York City, that is a total of $122M in benefits from a department of the city that spends less than $15M on trees and forestry staff, resulting in an annual net positive value to the city of more than $100M, from urban trees.

So, what do you think. Will we look back in 40 years and see nothing but the memories or bones of academic libraries? Or, will there still be units performing related duties that we still label, or at least think of occasionally, as libraries?

This blog post links to three, related commentaries. What do you think from the unique perspective of a SCUPer? Reply in the comments below, or go to SCUP's LinkedIn group and engage with the discussion there. Be sure to share not only your thoughts, but links to related resources. Thanks!

Early in 2011, before most of academia was even out of winter holiday hibernation, Brian T. Sullivan of Alfred University wrote a letter to The Chronicle of Higher Education, which is written from the perspective of a 2040 autopsy on the body of the dead academic library. His autopsy concluded that the death of the library could have been avoided by more realistic planning now.

In summary, it is entirely possible that the life of the academic library could have been spared if the last generation of librarians had spent more time plotting a realistic path to the future and less time chasing outdated trends while mindlessly spouting mantras like "There will always be books and libraries" and "People will always need librarians to show them how to use information." We'll never know now what kind of treatments might have worked. Librarians planted the seeds of their own destruction and are responsible for their own downfall.

As you might expect, there was a lot of buzz in the comments.

Nearly three weeks later, The Chronicle published another opinion, by Patricia A. Tully of Wesleyan University, who writes (labeling Sullivan as a Cassandra) that the end of the library is a long ways off:

Mr. Sullivan ends his article by stating that librarians "planted the seeds of their own destruction and are responsible for their own downfall," and he implies that this was in part by participating in the digitization of print materials and the development of a variety of online, unmediated services. But librarians should not be resisting these efforts to increase and enhance access to content—a central value of our profession is to make content as discoverable and accessible as possible to as many people as possible.

And in leading these efforts, we are not making our professional obsolete. Librarians in 2050 will be doing the same thing we are doing now—making content accessible to our users. We will be doing this very differently, of course, just as we are doing things very differently now than we did in 1960. The library will look and operate differently, and perhaps provide a different kind of experience for students and faculty. But the library's end is a long way off.

 Then, last week, James C. Pakala of Covenant Theological Seminary (St. Louis), asserts that Sullivan's autopsy report "Overlooks Libraries' Other Roles," saying that libraries do more than serve undergraduates, and also that faculty and staff require a great deal of information searching and analyzing assistance.

And as to IT taking over libraries, the opposite tends to predominate, owing to such factors as librarians' faculty ties, organizational ability, relational skills, etc. Ironically, the last Educause Review issue of 2010 even warns that campus IT operations could fade as technology becomes ubiquitous and consortia or other competitors beckon.

So, what do you think. Will we look back in 40 years and see nothing but the memories or bones of academic libraries? Or, will there still be units performing related duties that we still label, or at least think of occasionally, as libraries?

This blog post linked to three, related commentaries. What do you think from the unique perspective of a SCUPer? Reply in the comments below, or go to SCUP's LinkedIn group and engage with the discussion there. Be sure to share not only your thoughts, but links to related resources. Thanks!

"Slip-Sliding Away: An Anxious Public Talks About Today's Economy And The American Dream," is a report from Public Agenda which finds that the number one financial concern of economically-stressed Americans who also have children is college affordability. Also high on Americans' priorities, stressed financially or not: Social security and retirement benefits and job training.

If this isn't an indication of high demand for higher education, we don't know what is:

When it comes to what would be "very effective" in helping people become economically secure, the public puts its faith in higher education and job training, along with preserving programs like Social Security and Medicare. These are the top three solutions among both those who are struggling and those who aren't.

"Making higher education more affordable" led the list overall (63 percent) and among those who say they're struggling (65 percent). Preserving Social Security and Medicare was next at 58 percent (62 percent among the struggling) and expanding job-training programs came in third at 54 percent (56 percent for the struggling).

Neither cutting taxes for the middle class (48 percent) nor reducing the federal deficit (40 percent) get majority support, and other options rate even lower. ...

One reason for the faith in education may be the public's perception of who's struggling the most in the current economy. Three-quarters of Americans say that people without college degrees are struggling a lot these days, compared to just half who say college graduates are struggling.