As some of the most stable and important structures in society, colleges and universities are rarely described as nimble. Yet, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, institutions across the globe not only shifted within days to online instruction, but many academic researchers also immediately launched efforts to understand the virus,…

Florida's developmental education reform has benefitted most students directly impacted by the reform and has helped to reduce existing achievement gaps by race/ethnicity, English Language Learner status, and academic preparation in short-term outcomes like college course-taking and credit accumulation. Even though the reform was not specifically…

Equity gaps in students' experiences and academic outcomes often exist in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) college courses, particularly early prerequisite courses. The Student Experience Project (SEP) is a collaboration between college instructors, university leaders, and national education and improvement organizations to…

Effective communication by science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) professionals is crucial to building an informed and scientifically literate public (Holt, 2019). While universities do an excellent job of training scientists in the practices of their discipline, they often fail to produce scientists equally effective at communicating…

Shared governance has become a critical focus for senior leaders concerned with institutional resilience and effectiveness. A blue-ribbon commission of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB, 2014) called on boards to take seriously this area of responsibility. At the same time, shared governance is a notoriously…

A typology of budget-driven program reviews is categorized by two variables: the locus of responsibility and the timing of the review. When a budget-driven program review is first implemented during a crisis, the range of financial and administrative options are high, yet buy-in and match to mission are low. When a budget-driven program review is…

Top football programs around the country are leading a trend of building exclusive player-only villages to enhance the togetherness of the team. Although coaches love this idea, little thought has been given to the larger student development and isolation issues this trend creates for students on a team. Further segregating them from the rest of…

For decades, academia has been hampered by what appears to be preference for opacity and obfuscation. In an article published in this magazine three years ago, "The Vocabularies of Higher Education" (Gaston, 2014), the author lamented the welter of terms and acronyms that has accumulated over many decades, particularly within the current…

Which higher education paths will truly prepare students for the future is a big question with serious implications for students and families who invest their time and money, as well as for employers and communities that seek capable career candidates. It also leads to a bigger question: "Should graduates' employability be central to the…

Bringing international students to study at U.S. campuses is increasingly viewed as the best option to globalize the campus, yet the United States lags behind other countries in providing opportunities for international students, particularly at the undergraduate level. Although the one million international students studying in the United States…

Over the last few years, there have been some egregious examples of rape culture on college campuses that call into question the effectiveness of current sexual-assault policies. This article contains brief recaps of four recent events that took place at prominent American universities, drawn from a laundry list of contemporary examples. They…

As tuition levels rise, predictability is an increasingly important consideration of college financing. In this article, the authors explore contemporary policy tools intended to enhance tuition predictability. They specifically consider guaranteed tuition plans. The authors begin their discussion by considering the prevalence of guaranteed…

At the beginning of the 2016 academic year 77,214 freshman students at 44 campuses began the fall semester participating in the Re-Imagining the First Year (RFY) initiative of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU). These 44 institutions have formed a learning community that reviews and shares evidence-based practices,…

This article reports on a phenomenological study conducted in 2013 to investigate co-op learning from the students' perspectives. 104 seniors were interviewed who had completed one to three periods of co-op employment. A stratified purposeful sample with proportional representation of six university colleges was used. Using a standardized,…

The civic mission of American colleges and universities has received renewed attention over the last decade. From the "engaged campus" designation now offered by the Carnegie Endowment for the Advancement of Teaching to the growth of Campus Compact (from 782 institutional members in 2000 to 1150 in 2012) to major institutional…