At the conclusion of the 2007-08 academic year, the City of Keene and Keene State College (KSC) began to celebrate the college's 100th anniversary. Keene is the 23,000-person hub of a 70,000-person county in southwestern New Hampshire. The history of a supportive town-gown relationship began prior to the college's founding in 1909. The city had…

Scrutiny over faculty allocations of time and subsequent outcomes is frequent in postsecondary education, especially at state research universities (those that receive appropriations from the state). Particularly during economic downturns, college officials and legislators must make difficult choices in fund allocation. For this reason, faculty…

There are many articles about space management, including those that discuss space calculations, metrics, and categories. Fewer articles discuss the space budgeting processes used by administrators to allocate space. The author attempts to fill this void by discussing her administrative experiences with Middle Tennessee State University's (MTSU)…

Given their value to the student experience, institutional identity, alumni loyalty, and economic welfare, historic preservation efforts must unite with institutional sustainability efforts and other high priorities to develop an approach for mutual success. Further, it is important to recognize the limits in the current milieu of economic…

For many it's a dollars and cents issue; for others, it's a heritage or spiritual issue. In reality campus heritage is both a spiritual and a monetary/economic issue. Some say that heritage should reflect institutional values, tradition, academic stature, and the role graduates have played in society, and others cast aside tradition and pay…

A campus master plan cannot predict the future of a campus, but it can provide a valuable and productive road map for future development. This article suggests that such a road map might best meet an institution's needs and resources when it is linked to the reasons it decided to plan in the first place. Identifying the reasons for planning…

In 2004, the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education published "Ensuring Access with Quality to California's Community Colleges", funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. That report called attention to the considerable challenges facing the community colleges and the importance of addressing these problems. A…

A simple and readily understandable visual display of quantitative measures of academic efficiency and productivity is demonstrated in this article. This graphical construction facilitates annual comparisons of unit efficiency and productivity as well as an analysis of temporal changes in unit activity. By establishing a common framework upon…

As higher education institutions shift from a growth orientation to one of redistributing existing resources, budgeting can play a major innovative role. The author isolates a number of roles in the budgetary process, shows how these roles interact, and suggests how a budget can be redesigned. (Author/MLF)

Describes a methodology used by the Texas A&M University system to monitor the efficiency with which resources are employed. This participatory method of institutional choice can be used to plan for financial setbacks. (EV)

What is the capacity of online programs? Can these types of programs enroll more students than their face-to-face counterparts or not? This article looks at research on achieving cost-efficiencies through online learning, identifies the parts of an online program that can be changed to increase enrollments, and discusses whether a program's…

The Oregon University System developed a resource allocation model to equitably distribute state funding based on university mission and enrollments by level of instruction. A primary feature is that dollars (general fund and tuition and fees) follow the student to his or her enrolling university and are not redistributed to other programs and…

Offers colleges and universities some strategies when reallocation of funds is necessary. Discussion focuses on the use of facilitating teams to help department chairpersons, active promotion of reallocation in funding proposals, use of analytical databases in decision making, use of program audits, taxation policies, decentralization of decision…

The long-term concerns of colleges and universities have been shifting in recent years. Emphasis is increasingly being placed on the exploitation of all higher education resources through regional or State coordination. Explores the implications of the new priorities in higher education. (Author)

A "target ratio" model for effectively coupling decentralized planning and centralized budgeting within a college of arts and sciences is illustrated. It provides departments with realistic expectations of the budgetary resources available over a multiple-year time span while allowing them maximum flexibility in planning for the use of…