What Lucky Charms Can Teach You About Higher Ed Policy
If the easy solution is a quiet departure from the thing that made your institution worth attending in the first place, you need to understand reality. And the tricky part is that the easy choice might be easy to rationalize. It’s just a unicorn! They’re magical, and magic is kind of like luck, right? Who will even notice? It's just removing the thesis requirement because it scares off potential students. It's not even that important.
When Your Favorite Airline Stops Feeling Like Itself: A Lesson in Mission Drift for Higher Ed
I still fly Southwest occasionally. Old habits. But I'd be lying if I said the experience feels the same. And that's the thing about trust; it's much easier to lose than to rebuild. Once a loyal stakeholder starts wondering whether an institution was really built for them, winning that confidence back costs far more than it would have taken to keep it in the first place.
Dust Off Your Documentation: A Spring Cleaning Guide
Reactive maintenance is how you end up with an academic catalog that references a dean who left two years ago and a student handbook that contradicts your syllabus. A little proactive attention goes a long way, and late winter (which, again, we’re rebranding as Early Spring) is a great time to do it before the end-of-semester chaos kicks in and everyone's bandwidth evaporates.
The Practical Guide to Auditing Your College’s or University’s Website
The specifics vary by agency, but the core categories are consistent: student achievement data, accreditation or authorization status, tuition and refund policies, complaint procedures, and, if you offer programs leading to professional licensure, disclosures about whether those programs actually meet state requirements.
The Coach Behind the Medal: What the Winter Olympics Can Teach Higher Ed About Academic Advising
Behind every Olympic medalist is someone (a coach, a mentor, a scout) who saw something in them before they saw it in themselves. Someone who understood the sport deeply enough to recognize raw potential and knew how to cultivate it into world-class performance. In higher education, we call those people academic advisors. And the quality of that advising can mean the difference between a student who thrives and one who never finds their footing.
Rubrics That Stick the Landing: Lessons from Olympic Scoring
When the inevitable challenge arrives, the meticulous, defensible standards embedded in your rubrics will be the most effective advocates for student achievement, faculty equity, and the integrity of your degrees. A well-designed rubric provides the most effective mechanism for achieving transparency, protecting instructional consistency, and affirming academic standards. Let's break down what that looks like, Olympic style.