UB Buzz

Getting Real about Alcohol Awareness

Tying in with the 2009 National Collegiate Alcohol Awareness Week (October 18-24), Choose Responsibility, a non-profit organization, has launched an initiative for student body presidents to get their peers talking openly and honestly about alcohol-related issues.
Titled "Get REAL," the campaign is set to encourage these student leaders to sign on to this task of fostering education, leadership, and responsibility on subjects such as binge drinking, the legal drinking age, and campus alcohol policies. In the coming months, Get REAL signatories are expected to collaborate on stimulating discussions about alcohol that emphasize peer-to-peer accountability and explore possible alternatives to make their campuses safer, according to a media release.
"The time has come to treat college students as the young adults the law says they are," states John McCardell, Choose Responsibility's president and president emeritus of Middlebury College (Vt.), in the release.
McCardell adds the campaign will provide students with "an opportunity to influence the debate and show leadership on alcohol issues."
Learn more about the Get REAL campaign here.

Online in October

Five web exclusives are available on University Business' website this month.

- "Preventing Targeted Violence in Our Academic Institutions"
From the campus shootings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University to the student attack at a UCLA chemistry lab, targeted violence is a growing concern in higher education. However, administrators might not be aware of numerous resources that can aid in minimizing the risks of these events. Co-authors Arnette Heintze and Matthew Doherty of Hillard Heintze, a security advising firm, argue that the bulk of officials are missing the mark because most of them are focused on making certain the right measures are taken after a crisis has occurred. Instead, Heintze and Doherty write that they need to shift from a strategy based purely on response to one based much more strongly on prevention. They also offer their insight and factual data on this matter.

- "10 Tips for a Meaningful Campus Tour"
There's more to the campus tour that meets the eye, particular with a student's first impression. Mother/daughter writers Pamela and Margaret Rew offer 10 helpful tips administrators perhaps should consider to enhance this common admissions practice. (The Behind the News section in UB's current issue features a brief on this topic.) Margaret draws from her experience as a student and campus tour leader at Tufts University (Mass.) Pamela, a partner at KSS Architects, has designed academic buildings and master plans for a number of higher ed institutions.

- "More Than an Access Program: The Emerald Eagle Scholars at the University of North Texas"
Gretchen M. Bataille, president of the University of North Texas, writes about the students who have been helped by Emerald Eagle Scholars, with more than 1,200 students being able to receive an education at her institution. The program is aimed at students whose families earn $40,000 or less and most of which are often the first in their families to attend college. Instead of merely focusing on costs, Bataille explains the program was founded on three philosophical pillars—financial support, academic success, and engagement—so the participants "have the full breadth of education to succeed."

- "Laying a Secure Foundation for Student Privacy and Assessment"
The IT department not only has to protect the institution's networks from viruses and other malicious code, but also ensure that students don’t access illegal content or have their privacy jeopardized. This is a pretty tall order for groups often tight on money and staffing. Monique Lucey, senior manager, Solutions Marketing, for 3Com, offers advice from higher ed IT personnel on laying the groundwork for a safe and secure higher education enterprise.

- "Digitally Connected Learning Environments to Enhance Communication and Collaboration"
To support the variety of today’s various learning styles in digitally connected settings, community college buildings must have a robust technology backbone for channeling data to multiple locations—and in more ways than what was required in the past. Jim Luckey, director of design at SHW Group, provides examples on how three schools found architectural solutions that are doing just that.

Technology vs. H1N1

Flu coverage in the media has gone from reporting on every new case to focusing on the debate over the vaccine. But college and university health centers are still dealing with sick students and preventing the virus from spreading further. Many are realizing digital thermometers aren’t the only technology at their disposal for coping with the situation.

“We hope it hits a level where cases fall off,” says Bruce Wright, executive director for health and counseling services Washington State University, which has had the highest reported number of infections. “I anticipate we’ll continue to see cases during the semester.”

At most higher ed institutions, faculty are being encouraged to be lenient when students are ill, not require doctor’s notes for absences, and make arrangements for students to catch up. WSU leaders are among those planning to leverage the campus’s existing lecture capture technology while the flu runs its course.

“Using Mediasite to capture lectures is a prominent part of our contingency plan, among a number of other things,” says Saleh Elgaidi, director of IT services for academics and research at WSU Spokane. “We are working with faculty to build an archive of rich classroom experiences that we can extend to students who become ill or if we have an outbreak and there is mandated social distancing.”

Looking Up

NASA crashed two probes into the moon this morning in an attempt to find water. The University of Puget Sound (Wash.) must be eagerly awaiting the results, considering their admissions office began a recruiting campaign in that region over the summer.
The university had a toe hold in the area through an incoming freshman’s father—American astronaut John Phillips.

(Photo Courtesy of Nasa. John Phillips at the window of the Space Shuttle Discovery with his University of Puget Sound cap. He is in the Japanese “Kibo” laboratory. Outside the window are the rest of us. [the earth!])

Phillips admitted his daughter Alli last fall and volunteered to take the college’s baseball cap with him on the Space Shuttle Discovery’s April 2009 flight to the International Space Station.  Phillips says the photo session ran slightly amock.

“The cap’s a ‘one size fits most,’ which doesn’t work well on my oversized orb, even with a skinhead
haircut,” he wrote in an email. “I have symptoms of space ‘pumpkinhead’ in both photos; for the first few days in orbit, you feel like you’re standing on your head, with a red and puffy face.”

Apparently the college’s colors of maroon and white travelled at up to 17,500 miles per hour, or ten times the speed of a rifle bullet. It spent 13 days in outer space, circling the earth 202 times.

Phillips, a NASA science officer and flight engineer, met Puget Sound Vice President for Enrollment George Mills in Houston when his Lillis Scholar daughter Alli Phillips ‘12 was interviewing to study molecular and cellular biology at Puget Sound.

Mills says, “This was my first opportunity to work with an astronaut parent. John’s suggestion that he take Puget Sound memorabilia into space was an exciting one since it would extend the reach of Puget Sound.”

The college is getting some earthly good out of this by posting the space photo on its Facebook page and in alumni magazine Arches. So far though, no new enrollment queries have come in from the virgin territory.

University Nature Preserves Inspire Students

At some point every student wants to escape from campus. Between classes, social drama, jobs and internships, it is necessary for us to get away for a while. Some of us are lucky enough to go home or visit a friend at another school, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a complete escape without having to go far off campus?

Iowa State University has created a 76-acre nature preserve for students to immerse themselves in natural seclusion. Without having to go far, the Everett Casey Nature Center and Reserve offers a creek, acres of undisturbed natural life, and endangered plant life for students to study. This space is used across disciplines, but most extensively by the MFA in creative writing and environment program which has teamed up with architecture graduate students to execute a series of projects “mapping” the preserve both visually and verbally.

 

Other universities that boast nature preserves include SUNY Binghamton and The University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Nature Prerserve of Binghamton University, which consists of 182 acres of naturally preserved land, 20 of which is wetlands, allows professors to hold class outside and do hands-on research with students. Binghamton uses this preserve for many classes at the undergraduate and graduate levels, including ecology, arts, literature, and outdoor recreation. The University of Wisconsin-Madison also owns its own 300 acre preserve, the Lakeshore Nature Preserve, on the shoreline of Lake Mendota.  Lakeshore Nature Preserve affords students and professors the opportunity to do field research, escape to miles of hiking trails, or go sailing for an afternoon on the lake.

 

Future plans for Iowa State University's Everett Casey Nature Center and Reserve, which was donated by Everett Casey, a 1946 ISU graduate, include adding hiking trails, a road, running water and a septic system to make the preserve student-friendly. While these additions may be costly for the university, the Everett Casey Nature Center and Reserve allows science majors to conduct hands-on research and arts and science majors to seek artistic and creative inspiration. Regardless of discipline, this preserve allows enrichment in the classroom as well as an escape form the pressure of student life.

Satisfaction with Campus Climate a Key Persistance Indicator

Student satisfaction may be even more important than higher ed administrators already thought. A recent study found that increased student satisfaction, particularly with the campus climate, can increase student persistence. And using satisfaction indicators, the ability to predict retention is almost doubled when compared to more traditional  demographic characteristics and institutional features. It seems that with retention research, it pays for administrators to be open minded about the method.

The study, based on 27,816 students at 65 four-year public and private institutions, measured the extent to which student satisfaction predicted actual retention four to 12 months later (after accounting for demographic characteristics and institutional features). It was released by Noel-Levitz and Laurie Schreiner, chair and professor in the Department of Doctoral Higher Education at Azusa Pacific University (Calif.).

"Knowing students' levels of satisfaction with their college experience adds significantly to our ability to predict whether they return the next year," says Schreiner. The link between student satisfaction and graduation rates has been studies at the institutional level but not at the individual student level, she adds. "With this research study, this link between student satisfaction and retention for individual students has now moved from being an intuitive link to being an empirical one."

Study findings were broken out by class level.

• First-year students: Satisfaction with campus climate is especially crucial for retention. These students are more likely to persist when they are satisfied with their advisor's availability, are impressed with the course content in their major, believe that student fees are used wisely, and feel that the campus is a safe place.

• Sophomores: Campus climate, instructional effectiveness, advising, course content in major, variety of courses offered, feeling that faculty are fair and unbiased in the treatment of students, career services, and having a comfortable place to spend time between classes are the satisfaction areas most predictive of their next-year persistence.

• Juniors: The odds of returning for senior year are improved as satisfaction increases in areas such as advisors knowing graduation requirements, faculty availability outside of class, ability to experience intellectual growth on campus, and having a comfortable place to spend time in between classes (everybody likes a comfortable place to hang out, after all).

• Seniors: Retention shifts from being very connected to student satisfaction factors to instead depending on institutional characteristics and grade point average.

A paper based on the research, as well as slides and audio from a recent web conference on the report, can be found here.