Key points:
- Campus leadership involves many moving parts–how is your institution doing?
- Key strategies for education leaders to boost morale
- Here’s a new way to look at the enrollment cliff
- For more news on leadership priorities, visit eCN’s Campus Leadership hub
Higher-ed leadership is not for the faint of heart. And today, institutional leadership involves overseeing an impending enrollment cliff, navigating the needs of increasingly diverse student groups, and ensuring that learning is flexible and adaptable.
As campus leaders move forward and guide their institutions through another academic year, let’s take a look at some of the top issues, challenges, and priorities facing campus leadership today.
Attracting and retaining new higher-ed talent: Using a modern, forward-looking approach to hire the right faculty and staff can advance an institution’s strategic goals and mission. Recent changes in the labor environment have made it increasingly difficult for higher education institutions to attract and retain critically important faculty and staff. Learn more here.
Educator burnout: As workloads become more stressful, more and more educators are feeling the burn–and the burnout. Higher-ed instructors are juggling burdensome workloads that impact their mental health and well-being, leading to educator burnout, according to data in Teaching and Learning Workforce in Higher Education 2024, a new EDUCAUSE report surveying teaching and learning professionals. Learn more here.
Supporting student diversity: Without affirmative action, how can schools support student diversity? Institutions have an opportunity to rethink and improve admissions processes and recruitment strategies. The Supreme Court’s recent decision to strike down affirmative action in college admissions rocked the world of higher education, with academic institutions left to reevaluate their admissions policies and how they will continue to support diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Learn more here.
What matters most to students as they select an institution: Surveys of inbound students and their parents are helpful because they identify how an institution’s target audience made its decisions. Two recent surveys of 5,800 college-bound students and their parents (1,100) shed light on their unique approaches to the college selection process. The surveys highlighted the growing importance of social media and websites in recruitment, why campus visits are so important, and how money impacts the selection process. Learn more here.
AI and admissions: The possible use of AI in admissions raises questions about how universities would responsibly use it, particularly because essays might carry more weight after the elimination race-based admissions. Every year, university admissions officers read and sort through tens of thousands of essays. It’s a long, arduous process. Now, some researchers say an artificial intelligence tool may be able to help admissions officers sort through essays and recognize prospective students who might previously have gone unrecognized. Learn more here.
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