Research and the Road Ahead

Print Version

Learn about some of the association research efforts that will be highlighted at The Campus of the Future: A Meeting of the Minds.

By Alan Dessoff

Facilities, business, planning, and other institutional officers considering what the campus of the future should look like and how it should operate can find valuable guidance in the research that their professional associations conduct. Facilities, budgets, and personnel are the principal areas of responsibility for senior institutional officers, and “the more we can do in solid research that they can use to make objective decisions about where they are headed, the better off they are and the better we serve our members,” says APPA Executive Vice President E. Lander Medlin. APPA, the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) and the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) will highlight their research projects and results at The Campus of the Future: A Meeting of the Minds, July 8-11 in Honolulu.
   
APPA recently re-evaluated its strategic plan and concluded from overwhelming member response that “we need to expand research, because that is one of the most valuable things we do for members,” Medlin says. Members want applied research “to provide benchmarks, best practices, and credible information they can use to help us all set industry standards and guidelines,” she explains. “Each institution needs to know what other similar institutions are doing. It also has aspirations for where it wants to be. It needs to know where the industry is going and how it can benefit from that. That’s what our research program is about.”

Endowments and Student Aid

NACUBO focuses its research on producing two major annual studies. The NACUBO Endowment Study (NES) is the largest and longest running annual, voluntary survey of higher education institutions and their foundations about endowment holdings. It is the primary source of college and university endowment management and performance data in the United States.

For 15 years, NACUBO has conducted an annual tuition discounting survey. It collects information from independent colleges on the level of institutional student aid, percentage of students receiving institutional grants, net revenues, and other related data. With 450 participants, the 2004 survey marked the highest participation in the study’s history.

“It gets at a lot of different issues, including the net price—what it actually costs for a student to attend an institution,” says Jessica Shedd, NACUBO’s director of research and policy analysis. “There also are enrollment management issues such as how an incoming class is put together. One side of it is helping well-qualified students who can’t afford to attend your institution. The other side is attracting the students you would like to have and what that means for tuition revenue.” NACUBO is considering the future of the study, Shedd says, including possibly “moving more to a benchmarking system for institutions so they can compare themselves and their strategies to others.”

Other NACUBO research activities are mostly ad hoc, Shedd notes, often focusing on current legislative issues. Following implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to strengthen organizations’ financial accountability, for example, NACUBO surveyed its members to see how they were responding.

Model for Investment Strategy

Two studies that APPA researchers will report on at the Hawaii conference, both conducted through the association’s Center for Facilities Research (CFaR), demonstrate the type of research that Medlin says is useful to facilities officers and other senior administrators. “Building the Learning Environment Through Strategic Investment” is expected to produce a widely accepted model for understanding the total cost of investing in and maintaining college and university facilities. It is intended to help higher education policymakers—including presidents and chancellors, boards of trustees, and legislators—better understand the effect of major decisions on key issues. These include resource allocation; building design criteria; faculty and student recruitment and retention; construction strategies; the nature of the learning and research environment; and accountability measures.
   
“This is going to really drill in on the fundamental financing issues of facilities, with a cradle-to-grave approach to assessing and analyzing the investment strategies that are related to making the decision to build a facility,” explains Michael Sofield, APPA’s vice president for information and research and director of facilities planning and operations at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of American History. “There is a lot of information out there about what it costs to build, and there are lots of recommendations about how much you should spend every year to maintain your facilities and how much reinvestment you need to forecast to keep them in top condition. This project is pulling together all that material.”

The study’s findings will be important not just for APPA members but also for senior financial officers, provosts, and campus presidents “so they will be able to understand that there is a business approach to facilities,” Sofield notes.

Attracting and Keeping Students

The second APPA study, “The Effect of Educational Facilities on Recruitment and Retention of Students,” updates a 1984 study by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching that evaluated the decision-making process of parents and potential students in selecting a college or university. The latest CFaR study more fully explores how the type and quality of educational facilities affects student recruitment and retention.

“Since recruiting and retaining students is an essential part of the success of any institution, we think it will be a good guidance tool for people in admissions, residential life, development, the business office, and potentially for presidents,” says Gary L. Reynolds, one of the study’s principal investigators and codirector of CFaR and director of facilities services at The Colorado College.

APPA established CFaR about five years ago to coordinate what previously were ad hoc research activities by some members and to provide a mechanism “to answer some big-issue questions,” says Reynolds. In addition to CFaR’s projects, APPA began an annual facilities core data survey last year, the only comprehensive collection of facilities-related costs and personnel information; strategic financial measures; and other relevant data for colleges, universities, and K-12 schools and districts.

Institutions participating in the survey receive customized reports comparing their data to that of other participants. The information helps facilities officers budget for current spending, plan for future capital needs, and present their needs effectively to campus decision makers. The final Web-based report and database tools are published as facilities performance indicators.

Staying on Top of Trends

Phyllis Grummon, director of planning and education at SCUP, compiles a quarterly report to assist the organization’s board of directors and staff in their decision making. The report covers six key areas affecting higher education and lists current hot topics within them.

• Demographics – trends in student recruitment, enrollment, and retention and their effect on age, gender, ethnicity, income, and geographic distribution. Hot topics, according to SCUP, include Generations X and Y, European “massification,” and the impact of the Patriot Act on international student enrollment in the United States.

• Economy – trends in institutional budgeting practices and financial resource development, national and state education budgeting, financial aid and tuition, as well as global economic issues. Hot topics include reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, tuition increases, and the loss of international students to countries like Australia, China, and India.

• Environment – trends in environmental sustainability and green practices on campus. Hot topics include sustainability in the curriculum and institutions’ adoption of environmental practices, products, and services.

• Learning – trends in adult learning, how people learn, and campus and classroom design. Hot topics include the use of active learning and connecting emotions to learning.

• Politics - trends in government and legislation as well as elections. Hot topics include cuts in financial aid and research funding.

• Technology – trends concerning the use of information technology on campus. Hot topics include wireless networks, the campus community’s use of electronic devices, course management systems, and privacy protection.

The Trends report released last February addressed such issues as “growing
dissatisfaction with the usefulness and accuracy” of national statistics on student race/ethnicity. It cited a study by the American Association of Colleges and Universities that showed, among other things, that the increase in the number of students identifying as “other” or “unknown” likely leads to overstated enrollment figures for minorities.

This trend “affects every level of the institution,” SCUP wrote. “Campuses may need to improve the accuracy of their statistics by not only collecting data on student admission applications but through surveys conducted once students are already on campus.” Other issues in the February Trends report included how some institutions are “strengthening the old concept of ‘in loco parentis’ and accepting greater responsibility for more parts of students’ lives,” and how Hurricane Katrina and increases in oil and natural gas costs have created unexpected deficiencies in institutions’ operating and capital budgets.

Copies of the Trends reports are free and available to the public on SCUP’s Web site. In addition to compiling and publishing Trends, SCUP conducts what Grummon calls “action research” with a specific focus. She cites a survey on hot topics for community college planners. SCUP also collects data for an annual campus facility inventory on the amount of space devoted to residence halls, athletic facilities, research laboratories, classrooms, and offices.

Whatever the nature of each association’s research activities, they have value beyond the individual organizations that conduct them. Says APPA’s Medlin, “We not only have to educate our own members about the facilities issues important to us, we also have to educate the broader higher education community about them and the kinds of decisions that have to be made that are critical to the future success of individual institutions and of higher education in general.” 

Alan Dessoff is a freelance writer based in Bethesda, Maryland.

Resources

APPA
www.appa.org/cfar
Steve Glazner
cfar@appa.org

NACUBO
www.nacubo.org/research
Jessica Shedd
jessica.shedd@nacubo.org

SCUP
www.scup.org/knowledge
Phyllis Grummon
phyllis.grummon@scup.org