Stylus Publishing (VA) Pursuing Quality, Access, and Affordability: A Field Guide to Improving Higher Education

Whether they recognize it or not, virtually all colleges and universities face three Grand Challenges:Improve the learning outcomes of a higher education: A large majority of college graduates are weak in capabilities that faculty and employers both see as crucialExtend more equitable access to degrees: Too often, students from underserved groups and poor households either don’t enter college or else drop out without a degree. The latter group may be worse off economically than if they’d never attempted college.Make academic programs more affordable (in money and time) for students and other important stakeholder groups: Many potential students believe they lack the money or time needed for academic success. Many faculty believe they don’t have time to make their courses and degree programs more effective. Many institutions believe they can’t afford to improve outcomes.These challenges are global. But, in a higher education system such as that in the United States, the primary response must be institutional. This book analyzes how, over the years, six pioneering colleges and universities have begun to make visible, cumulative progress on all three fronts. Review Dr. Ehrmann's treatment of how to enhance studentoutcomes in higher education goes deep into the centrality of teaching andlearning as a core function of the college. It also explores the emergingfrontier of technology-enabled instruction and student services, data-drivendecision-making, and remaking the academy for the next 100 years. It is apractical and thought-provoking work.--Louis Soares, Chief Learning & Innovation Officer "American Council on Education"Highereducation has been headed toward a crisis of cost, quality and equity fordecades. Institutions often attend to one issue but not the others, leavingthe enterprise sorely lacking in a way forward. This book is one of themost important to be published in higher education in decades. It showcasesinstitutions that have made progress on all three fronts. The book provides abeacon to lead other institutions into a sustainable and healthy future inwhich all students, faculty and staff thrive. Thevision for higher education outlined in this book is fundamentally differentfrom how institutions have operated up until now. It requires institutionaltransformation which, although challenging, will ultimately give highereducation the resiliency it needs to endure in coming decades. This bookprovides the principles, approaches, and case study examples to helpinstitutions in this difficult but worthy work of change. --Adrianna Kezar, Wilbur Kieffer Endowed Professor and Dean's Professor of Leadership, Director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education "University of Southern California"I plan to use this as a textbook in our graduate programon learning, design, and technology! It offers great insights into academictransformation and its implications for academic outcomes, culture, and professionalroles. For example, as the book illustrates, future leaders must be skilled atworking across organizational boundaries; Ehrmann shows how they will need tobridge hidden clashes in assumptions, culture, and even terminology, e.g., common terms with two or more widely used, clashing definitions, terms such as 'teaching, ' 'online course, ' and 'transformation.'--Yianna Vovides "Director, Learning Design and Research at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), Curriculum Director & Professor for the Master of Arts in LDT Program at Georgetown University"Theproblem: US higher education is teemingwith initiatives that seek to improve access, or quality, oraffordability But these efforts are typicallysiloed, fragmented, and under-performing, hindered as much by educators' ownsense of what can't be done as by other impediments. The Ehrmann solution: An evidence-informed Integrative framework for campus change that knits allthree priorities together and makes each a means to the o