As we continue celebrating our first year, it’s time to look back at the best Higher Ed Professor posts. I found it interesting to look back and see which posts seemed to connect most with people. For those of you who are new, I hope these will be helpful. If you’ve been here since the beginning, did your favorite make the list?
Here are the top Higher Ed Professor posts from our first year.
Today marks a special day here at Higher Ed Professor. It was one year ago that the site went live. Every Monday and Thursday, I’ve tried to deliver content that people in higher education would find interesting and useful. The response has been tremendous and I have learned so much along the way. In today’s post, I want to share a few insights and things I’ve learned during the year. I also have two special requests for everyone at the end of the post.
When I first started Higher Ed Professor, my hope was the site would be a resource for faculty and administrators in colleges across the country.
I had no idea how great the response would be and have been thrilled at how the information has been shared.
The blog has been viewed in over 100 countries and 49 states.
(Hey Wyoming, what did I ever do to you? Way to mess up the statistics)
The number of page views continues to grow with more than 12,000 total during our first year.
Clearly, there is room for an ongoing conversation about higher education issues.
One of the most fun aspects of this journey has been hearing from people with interesting perspectives on some of the issues that have come up over the year. I hope we get to do more of this during our second year.
Recently, I have had several people ask me about the blog and what I’ve learned from the process. Three things immediately come to mind.
First, writing posts twice a week has forced me to keep writing. We all know how important it is to maintain the writing muscle. Even when things are crazy, I have managed to crank out a post. My best guess is that I’ve written about 250 pages of text this year just in blog posts. Forcing myself to do this has helped me be productive in all of my writing efforts.
Second, blogging as helped my voice as a writer and researcher. I always aim to make posts that are a quick read and even easy to skim. My strategy has been to share an interesting idea or two that might spark something in a reader. This has encouraged me to lose all of the academic jargon that often obscures ideas in scholarly publications. My scholarly writing is better for having to explain ideas in 600-700 word blog posts.
Third, I have become a more thoughtful observer of what is happening both in higher education nationally and around me personally. When you have to produce two posts a week, you are constantly searching for inspiration. From class conversations to reading the Chronicle and InsideHigherEd, I believe I’ve become a more thoughtful observer of higher education. My hope is this translates to better posts.
As many benefits as I’ve gotten from Higher Ed Professor, I hope many of you have found a few nuggets that were thought-provoking or helpful in some way.
In that spirit, I have two requests that I would like to make:
1. If you have found the site helpful or enjoyed reading Higher Ed Professor, please share with a colleague or post to your social networking sites. I truly hope this content is helpful and if so want to share it with as many people in higher education as possible. If you’ve been thinking about a birthday present to celebrate our first birthday, sharing the site would be perfect!
2. In order to be more responsive, I would love to hear from you about ideas or areas that you’d like to see me discuss over the next year. I’ve found some of the best posts over this year were suggestions by readers, colleagues, and friends. What would you like to see discussed in a post? What are you struggling with right now? Have you always wondered why colleges do something in a certain way? I would really appreciate a quick email or tweet with a couple of ideas for posts.
When you publish a research article, it often seems to just go into space with few responses or feedback from readers. Fortunately, this format provides plenty of opportunities to engage and have a conversation.
Finally, I want to thank all of you who have read the blog and especially those who have signed up to receive our new posts via email (if you haven’t done this, sign up in the box in the upper right corner).
Your response has been more than I expected and I’m looking forward to our continuing conversation!
Universities can play a significant role in the long-term success of their cities. While universities may have once been called unengaged ivory towers, today, universities participate as active stakeholders in their communities. Given the knowledge economy, universities can serve a vital role in improving the economic and social status of cities. In today’s post, I want to describe the role of universities as anchor institutions and how they can benefit urban regions.
The scholarly literature describes universities (and hospitals) as anchor institutions, meaning stable organizations upon which to base development efforts.
Anchor institutions are like large department stores in a mall. The serve as a key driver of people and activity.
Universities possess all the characteristics of anchor institutions.
Four years ago, anyone who was living in Alabama can tell you where they were and what happened. The state was struck with a string of violent tornadoes in a generational outbreak that killed over 200 people. I remember staring in disbelief as local television stations showed the devastation live. I remember messaging with friends to make sure everyone was safe. It was truly horrific. Yet, it also could have been much worse. If the EF4 tornado that cut a path through Tuscaloosa had been just a few hundred yards to the north, it would have cut through the heart of campus. I don’t even want to think about what the loss of life on campus might have been if that had occurred.
One of the strange things about the tornado outbreak was that the damage was so bad in some places and other locations never even saw a drop of rain. At our house, I’m not sure we even had a cloud in the sky while 20 miles away there was complete destruction.
Two days later I went to Tuscaloosa for the first time to help a local nonprofit distribute food and supplies. My strongest memory is thinking that it all looks like it does on the news. The difference is that everywhere you looked— 360 degrees— was tornado damage. It was truly unbelievable.
When I think back to the way the University of Alabama responded, I think there are lessons for every campus. Unfortunately, we know that colleges are not immune from natural disasters from earthquakes to floods to hurricanes to tornadoes. Colleges can learn from the experience of Tuscaloosa to prepare for making decisions should the unthinkable occur.
1. Get students out of town. One of the first responses by UA was to cancel classes, cancel graduation, and send everyone home. The city needed to free up infrastructure (both personnel and equipment) and sending students home helped with this. College towns are notoriously quiet in the summer when the students are away. When a crisis happens, people wondering around and in the way are no help. Send your students home for at least a little while to help out local officials.
2. Open campus facilities. Universities have valuable facilities that can be used for assisting victims. Residence halls, cafeterias, large spaces such as recreation centers all can be used to support the immediate needs of the community. Have a plan for using this spaces including staffing. Also, realize that some staff may be victims as well so contingency plans are useful.
3. Leverage existing campus systems to provide volunteer opportunities. Particularly for a large scale disaster, one of the biggest challenges is managing the wave of volunteers, supplies, and resources that begin to pour into the area. Use existing networks and campus offices (for example: student affairs or community service office) to organize. Provide administrative and logistical support for the offices to dramatically ramp up their operations. It is easier to build up existing infrastructure than creating a new one from scratch.
4. Provide a way for students to help. When a disaster strikes their community, students are not only willing but eager to help. Put them to use. A university has a large and generally physically fit population to lend assistance. Using the campus systems noted above, provide opportunities for students to help with clean up and other duties where strong young people can help.
5. Use campus expertise for immediate help and support. As a research university, UA was poised to help the community in other ways. Using emergency grant funding from the NSF, engineering faculty conducted structural analyses of damaged buildings to assist with future construction and building codes. This immediate research was critically important as the data can be lost when clean up begins. You don’t want to delay the clean up process so leveraging local researchers was enormously helpful. Faculty and graduate students can provide all kinds of immediate assistance from testing water to supporting K-12 schools to conducting damage assessments. The ability to serve in this role will depend on the expertise of the university, but the community can leverage local experts in a crisis.
Unfortunately, we know that another natural disaster will occur on or near a college campus. There is nothing we can do about that.
However, by learning the lessons from April 27th, I hope our colleges and universities can be ready to support their communities.
Cities and higher education institutions don’t always get along. When disaster strikes, we can set that aside and use the resources and expertise of higher education to support victims.
I can’t think of a better way for higher education to show how much teaching, research, and service matter than leveraging those missions for a community in crisis.
Due to the unique role of state universities in an environment of limited resources, an inevitable tension exists between educational quality and access as evidenced during tuition and funding debates. Tuition and federal financial aid policies are only part of the solution and institutions ought to reevaluate the use of state need-based financial aid programs. In today’s post, I want to share an excerpt from an article of mine that appeared in the Journal of Student Financial Aid.
As noted in the business literature, firms use branding to differentiate their product from others in the marketplace (Aaker, 1991, 1996). Branding can be applied to higher education, although it has seen limited application in the literature to date (Toma, Dubrow, & Hartley, 2005; Sevier, 2001). Little research exists on how the marketing approach of student financial aid programs influences students’ enrollment behavior (Perna, 2005).
The literature on higher education branding largely addresses broad generalities with few empirical studies on the current activities of universities to market themselves as a brand (Moore, 2004; Fickes, 2003). Aaker (1991) defines a brand as a “distinguishing name and/or symbol” used to identify and distinguish between competitors (p. 7). Branding is a multidimensional concept that can often serve as a key means of differentiation for consumer decision making (Aaker, 1996; Keller 2003).
Brand image, which is a collective set of perceptions consumers associate with a given brand, serves as a key notion for this study (Keller, 1993). The perceptions of external audiences about the university can impact any number of university initiatives from student recruitment to state appropriations. For this study, we use the concepts of image and branding to understand how a university can use a signature financial aid initiative to create and foster an institutional image of providing access as part of the brand.
Colleges and universities use a number of marketing and business strategies to attempt to differentiate themselves within the crowded postsecondary marketplace. These efforts often center on the admissions and student recruitment processes through the use of targeted marketing campaigns substantiated by brochures, view books, and other printed materials. In addition to these traditional avenues, marketing efforts are increasingly using technology with a strong web presence or use of DVDs. Whether using print or technology based materials, colleges employ a variety of aspects of their brand and image to attract and influence student opinions.
Logos, mascots, and school colors are among the most commonly used aspects of image that are leveraged. There are less tangible or obvious aspects of the institution that can be tapped to improve market position and brand image. The scholarly literature has not sufficiently explored the ways that culture can be used or “branded” to improve the competitive position of an institution (Toma, Dubrow, & Hartley, 2005).
