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Thursday, September 8, 2011

The Out-of-State Solution to College Budgets

Colorado Mesa University was typical of most public institutions in the fall of 2007, with out-of-state students making up a small number, about 5 percent, of the overall student body. But when the economic downturn hit in the fall of 2008, and state support for higher education began dwindling, Colorado Mesa President Tim Foster knew it was time to shake up the status quo. He decided to aggressively recruit out-of-state students, who pay 50 percent to 60 percent more than do Colorado residents. “Obviously the purchasing power of in-state students from a budgetary perspective was not very good,” Foster says.


The school embedded a recruiter in California and sent additional admissions representatives to such key Western feeder states as Wyoming and Utah. The school even targeted Hawaii.


The work has paid off: This fall, out-of-state students make up 12 percent of Colorado Mesa University’s overall student body, bringing in about $3 million to $5 million in additional revenue annually. Foster’s goal is see nonresident enrollment reach 25 percent in five years. “If we can continue to grow—but grow out-of-state faster—that will work well for us,” he says.


Colorado Mesa University’s tactics are not unusual. To counter state budget cuts, public universities from California to Ohio are courting out-of-state students and the tuition premiums they pay. To attract these students, institutions are using sophisticated recruiting techniques, embedding recruiters in feeder states, ramping up advertising campaigns, and even giving students breaks on out-of-state fees. Recruiting of nonresidents is likely to grow in the next few years as budget slashing increases. At least 25 states have made substantial cuts in funding for state colleges and universities this fall—reductions that will have a direct impact on students, according to the latest report from the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.


Bloomberg BusinessWeek
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Carnegie Mellon University Receives $265 Million Pledge

Carnegie Mellon University has received a huge new pledge to expand its programs.


The $265 million gift from former steel executive William S. Dietrich II is one of the largest in recent years from an individual to a private university, and the largest in the school's history, officials told The Associated Press.


The recession has impacted charitable giving, and the Dietrich pledge may be part of a resurgence. Last week the University of Southern California announced a $6 billion capital campaign. The Dietrich pledge also brought Carnegie Mellon close to meeting its $1 billion campaign.


The pledge also marks another chapter in Pittsburgh's transition from steel to tech. Dietrich is the former chairman of Dietrich Industries Inc., a supplier of steel building materials. Carnegie Mellon was founded as a technical school in 1900 by steel king Andrew Carnegie, but in recent years it has become known for world-class programs in computer science, robotics and the arts.


AP via The Boston Globe
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iLibrarian: How to Embed Twitter Testimonials on Your Website


Charlene Kingston at the Social Media Examiner provides an excellent tutorial for How to Embed Twitter Testimonials on Your Website. By following these quick 6 steps, you can “easily tap into tweets from people who say great things about your business”… or your library!



•#1: The Twitter Widgets page
•#2: Customize your widget heading
•#3: Customize your widget preferences
•#4: Customize your widget to your site and brand colors
•#5: Customize your widget to fit the space on your site
•#6: Finish your Twitter Faves Widget
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Innovative Educators Webinar: Assessment Of Student Learning: Strategies For Moving Forward



Webinar Description

Assessment of student learning is not a fad and is not going away; it is central to the mission and purpose of higher education. Campuses are engaged in developing purposeful assessment cycles that inform and improve teaching and learning. Maintaining momentum with the assessment of student learning requires campuses to stay "SMART"


Showcasing success
Maintaining relationships
Assessing, assessing, assessing
Reporting
Training.


In this webinar we will discuss how these five areas are critical to building and sustaining the assessment of student learning. For many campuses, getting started was a challenge but moving forward and keeping the momentum can be a struggle as well. This workshop will ask participants to consider their assessment challenges. A discussion of ways to keep assessment front and center so that programs continue to improve teaching and learning in meaningful ways will follow. You and your colleagues will walk away with tools and strategies you can begin using immediately to enhance assessment planning and use of assessment to improve teaching and learning on your campus.


Objectives
Participants will:
• Review the challenges of getting started and maintaining plans for assessing student learning
• Discuss strategies for supporting programs and faculty in the assessment of student learning
• Identify tools to enhance assessment planning and use of assessment to improve teaching and learning
• Consider how they can begin using these strategies immediately
• Determine which strategies might work best on their campuses


Who is the Speaker?
Jodi Levine Laufgraben is the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and Assessment at Temple University. Dr. Laufgraben has over twenty years of experience in higher education including administration, accreditation management, teaching, faculty development, and program evaluation. She has collaborated with faculty and senior leadership on academic program development and assessment. In her current role she manages program review for over 80 academic units and accreditation and assessment activities for the Office of the Provost. She serves as her institution's liaison to the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. She has experience developing and assessing academic programs aimed at improving undergraduate teaching and learning. Dr. Laufgraben was a member of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education's Advisory Panel on Student Learning and Assessment that assisted in the development of the 2003 publication "Student Learning Assessment." She presents and write on a variety of topics related to higher education and student success: assessment of student learning, program evaluation, learning communities, faculty development, collaborative learning, academic affairs/student affairs partnerships, academic advising, and student development and teaches courses on planning, research design, classroom research, and administrative theory and practice in Temple's College of Education.
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Social Media Examiner: 21 Dangerous Blogging Mistakes (and How to Fix Them)


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Harvard Education Letter September/October 2011



September/October 2011



Journal Harvard Education Letter


Publisher Harvard Education Publishing Group


ISSN 8755-3716 (Print)


1943-5053 (Online)


Subject Education, General Education, Humanities, Social Sciences and Law and Learning and Instruction


Issue Volume 27, Number 5 / September/October 2011


Pages 1-8


Pages 1-8


Online Date Friday, September 02, 2011


Contributors



Dan Rothstein, Luz Santana, David McKay Wilson, David Sobel




Contents
1. Teaching Students to Ask Their Own Questions: One small change can yield big results by Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana

2. Leading a System Where Everyone Gains: An Interview with Jerry Weast by David McKay Wilson

3. When the Community Becomes the Classroom: Changing the school improvement paradigm with place-based education by David Sobel
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Social Media Examiner: 7 Tips to Increase Your Blog Comments


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The Chronicle of Higher Education: Study Finds Minority Students Benefit From Minority Instructors


September 6, 2011
By Dan Berrett

Minority students in community colleges fare better academically if their instructors are of the same underrepresented minority groups, according to a working paper released this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

For students who are African-American, Latino, or Native American, taking a course with an instructor from the same group can cut in half the rate by which their academic performance lags behind their white peers in three key categories, as reported in “A Community-College Instructor Like Me: Race and Ethnicity Interactions in the Classroom.”

Minority students who are taught by minority instructors are 2.9 percentage points less likely to drop a course, 2.8 percentage points more likely to pass that course, and 3.2 points more likely to score a B or better, the study found. The positive effects were strongest for young black students.

The report, by Robert Fairlie, Florian Hoffmann, and Philip Oreopoulos, who are economists at, respectively, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Toronto, was based on data reflecting the experiences of about 30,000 students at De Anza Community College, near San Francisco.

The findings confirm in a more statistically nuanced fashion much of the conventional wisdom that has supported efforts to hire faculty members from groups that tend to be underrepresented in the professoriate.
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Archiving the Web for Scholars - Inside Higher Ed


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