Learning Resources

Join Nick Santilli and Jim Downey for a conversation that will highlight the SCUP Spring Trends and SCUP Trends for Canada reports. Scanning the external environment is a key factor in keeping your institution nimble and change-ready—two facets necessary for effective institutional planning. These documents are essential tools for strategic planning, scenario planning, and contingency planning.

Hear how Grand Valley State University’s Loren Rullman frames the changes COVID-19 brings to student life, using the word “more”—more technology, more options, more outside-the-box thinking, and more action and cultural change—as we look ahead to the transformation of campuses for fall and beyond.

This special issue of Trends focuses on the forces and events affecting Canadian higher education. Our guest editors contributed observations, trends, and insights based on their work within Canadian colleges and universities.

Nearly half of all college students today avoid at least one food allergen, according to a report listed in our Spring 2020 issue of Trends in Higher Education. As the number of students with disclosed food allergies continues to rise, allergen-free dining has become a key consideration in creating a healthy and inclusive campus—as well as in recruitment and retention efforts. Recently, Michigan State University opened an allergen-free dining hall on its campus called Thrive. We caught up with Gina Keilen, Registered Dietitian, Culinary Services, at Michigan State to learn more about the planning process and how her team’s efforts are positively impacting the campus community.

The pace of change keeps speeding up. This issue focuses on forces and changes directly impacting higher education, now and in the future.

The practice of environmental scanning is often a first step in the strategic planning process. Typically, planning teams engage in an exhaustive analysis of the internal and external forces acting on the institution to set the planning context. But should scanning the internal and external environment be limited to the early phases of strategic planning?

How is the world changing outside of higher education, and how is higher education responding to change? This report focuses on trends both inside and outside higher education.

In one eight-hour day, six teams came together to perform scanning, analysis, and prioritization activities, all toward one goal: setting “positive, but not delusional” strategic directions that would be the basis of the college’s strategic plan.

This edition focuses primarily on forces of change from inside academe that may drive further evolution in colleges and universities.

We look through an array of lenses outside the world of higher education to gain some perspective on issues and opportunities that appear to be on the horizon—or at our doors.