Strategic Faculty Recruitment

As institutions strive to grow their research enterprises, selection and recruitment of faculty is critical. The Council presents strategies for determining a recruitment approach, selecting the appropriate level of faculty to recruit, and targeting specific faculty members. In addition, research explores practices for attracting faculty to the campus and supporting faculty through the transition.

Revising the Program Portfolio: Elevating Academic Program Performance and Strategic Alignment

At many institutions, program review is an underproductive exercise. Review of existing programs is often a check-the-box formality, with inconsistent criteria and little connection to institutional priorities or funding considerations. Decisions about where to concentrate resources across the portfolio can be highly politicized. This report profiles how academic planning exemplars use program review as a strategic tool, integrating data on academic quality, student demand, and resource utilization to improve the economics of challenged programs and prioritize programs for investment and expansion.

Managing Dual Enrollment Programs: Review of Program Models, Operations, and Outcomes

Universities that offer dual enrollment programs for high school students must manage increasing student demand in the face of changing state legislation. This brief examines how institutions finance their dual enrollment programs, and how they ensure academic rigor as their programs continue to grow. The report also considers how dual enrollment programs ensure that students can transfer credits, and what strategies they use to encourage DE students to matriculate as undergraduates.

Integrated Marketing and Strategic Resources

As institutions seek in to increase enrollments, they create centralized marketing offices that oversee all institutional branding. This report examines staff and technology resources necessary to support centralized marketing efforts. It also describes advertising spend mixes and the assessment of integrated marketing initiatives.

Incentives for Increased Graduate Enrollments: Incentive Types and Implementation Strategies

Institutions seeking to increase graduate enrollment consider incentivizing program growth. This report outlines ways that institutions allow graduate programs to keep surplus revenue, including tuition rebates, funding proportional to credit-hours, and decreased tax rates. It also examines scholarship programs created to increase admitted graduate student yield, new program offerings, and ongoing unit review.

Impacts of Graduate Student Enrollment Increases

As graduate schools seek to increase enrollment, faculty and staff must consider the impacts of enrollment increases on program curricula, faculty workloads, and course delivery methods. This brief examines how other institutions prepare for and implement increases in graduate enrollment. More specifically, the report reviews how graduate enrollment goals and rates impact faculty workloads, program curriculum and course delivery methods.

Faculty Instructional Quality Assessment Practices Incorporating Teaching Portfolios and Peer Review with Student Course Evaluations

Program directors and department chairs require different means of assessing faculty quality due to the unreliability of student course evaluation data. This report outlines alternative strategies for review committees to assess faculty instructional quality. This report also details incorporation of annual performance reviews for tenure-track faculty into tenure decisions.

Expediting New Program Development: Meeting Market Demand and Leveraging Internal Resources

Expediting new program development can help universities meet student and employer demand while gaining an edge over competitors, but coordinating program development and approval requires careful preparation and execution. This report profiles strategies to measure market demand for new programs, choose programs for accelerated development, and leverage internal resources. The report also suggests ways to structure and staff program development to maximize speed and effectiveness.

Evaluating Department Chair and Program Director Compensation

This brief examines compensation policies for department chairs and program directors at public institutions, with a particular focus on the factors that determine compensation. The report includes an analysis of department chairs and program director responsibilities, monetary compensation, and non-monetary compensation.

Ensuring Multimodal Course Consistency

The growth of online, hybrid, and distance courses challenges institutions to maintain content consistency across multiple platforms. This report examines the policies, standards, and practices that guide course consistency initiatives.

Developing Comprehensive Academic Plans

Institutions engage in academic planning to supplement strategic planning processes and guide future academic direction. This report profiles the processes seven public research institutions undertook to develop comprehensive academic plans and to identify opportunities to create signature “programs of tomorrow.

Developing a Credit for Prior Learning Program: System-Wide Strategies for Program Creation, Operations, and Recruitment

Credit for prior learning programs help students complete degrees more quickly and for less money. This report addresses the challenges of scaling up a credit for prior learning program at the university system level, and explores the delineation of responsibilities between system staff and institutional staff.

Consolidating Program Accreditation Data for Regional Review

Regional accreditors often desire the same metrics and data collected by professional program reviews, but may use different terminologies to describe this information; as a result, some schools must manually translate or even recollect data already stored. This report profiles strategies to proactively consolidate the language and policies of accreditation to avoid duplication of labor and to efficiently route program accreditation data that will be repurposed in regional review. It also suggests ways to select new technologies that can streamline data collection, storage, and presentation.

Assessing Merit Aid and Need-Based Aid At Private Institutions

Institutions provide students with full tuition merit awards through formal scholarship programs for outstanding performance in academics, leadership, community service, and athletics. This brief outlines how institutions fund and utilize merit to increase retention rates, particularly for minority and first generation students.

Online and Hybrid Course Prioritization Guide: 10 Strategies for Promoting Enrollment Growth and Student Success

Institutions of all shapes and sizes are investing significant sums to expand their portfolio of online and hybrid courses without specific institutional priorities in mind, often resulting in a mix of arbitrary, sub-scale offerings. This creates an unsustainably expensive disconnect between the institution’s online portfolio (largely steered by unit-level interests and capacity) and its overarching interest in using technology to increase access, improve student success, and grow revenue. This guide is designed to help institutional leaders prioritize scarce resources devoted to online and hybrid course development toward the most promising available opportunities. By targeting specific curricular "gaps," institutions can improve retention, reduce time-to-degree, regain or expand their share of currently enrolled student credit hours, or even attract new students to existing programs.