1. The Accessible Campus
Over the last 50 years, Congress has enacted significant legislation to open up higher education to students, faculty, and staff members with disabilities. Yet colleges are still a long way from achieving equity for disabled people.
Census data show that 18 percent of disabled adults aged 25 and older hold a bachelor’s degree, a rate half that of adults without disabilities. And disabled people are underrepresented among college faculty and staff.
Many colleges fall short of compliance with federal laws, opening them up to lawsuits and discrimination complaints. Meanwhile, caseloads are growing as students seek accommodations for an expanding range of conditions.
This Chronicle report examines how colleges are working to make physical and digital spaces accessible to all and the challenges that students and employees face in obtaining accommodations. It features insights from activists, leaders in disability services, and students, staff, and faculty members with disabilities.
2. Building a Faculty That Flourishes
Colleges and universities cannot be successful without vibrant and engaged faculties. They’re instrumental to the student experience and drive the research that can set an institution apart. Yet college budgets are tight, traditions of tenure and academic freedom are under increasing scrutiny, and professors are burned out.
Now is the time to figure out sustainable ways to recruit, support, and diversify the faculty. This in-depth report will examine the current state of play, challenges facing the professoriate, and new workforce models that have emerged.
3. Building Tomorrow’s Workforce
Colleges striving for “student success” can no longer count just graduation rates; they must demonstrate that graduates are finding jobs in their chosen fields. If they don’t, enrollments will fall, public skepticism about higher education will grow, and lawmakers will take note.
To make that college- to career-connection, institutions must understand what employers want. What do they mean when they say, “we’re not getting the skills we need?” Do college majors matter? Is the purported movement away from degrees and toward skill-sets really happening?
This report provides insights into employers’ views on those questions and more. Rich with data and examples of colleges successfully placing their graduates, it also examines several growing job sectors and the emerging skills needed to work in them. And it explains the gap between what colleges think they’re offering and what employers say they’re seeing among job candidates.
4. College as a Public Good
Public confidence in higher education has fallen in recent years, with barely half of Americans seeing it in a positive light. Yet polling shows that people are far more likely to view their local college favorably, a perception that may be burnished by their many interactions with their hometown institution. This new report delves into the many roles colleges play in their local towns, states, and regions -- as educators and employers, real-estate developers, arts-and-culture magnets, civic conveners, and public-health champions.
At a crucial moment for higher education, this report examines how colleges can reimagine their traditional outreach to find innovative ways to partner with their communities and rebuild public trust.
5. The Future of Advising
Student success is critical to keeping students enrolled, and good advising is widely seen as central to student success. Advisers are some of the first professionals students meet on campus. But it doesn’t always go well. Academic advising is one of the most misunderstood and undersupported divisions on campus, plagued by low pay, large caseloads, and high turnover.
Good advising systems can increase professionalism and pride in this underappreciated field, help close equity gaps, and ensure students effectively navigate their path to a degree. How can university leaders set advising up for success?
6. The Future of Campus Safety
Colleges can’t foresee and avoid every possible safety concern, and the particular challenges they face have evolved and will continue to change. Yet students, parents, faculty, and staff are demanding colleges do more to keep campuses safe from violence. Institutions are expanding and diversifying mental-health offerings to strengthen the safety net designed to catch people on the edge. And advocates are demanding that colleges concentrate more on the root causes of sexual assault and on intervening before the violence is committed.
This report will help you understand the landscape of campus safety, and will delve into strategies colleges are employing to counter threats to well-being. Through expert insights, case studies of colleges that have found success with new techniques, and advice for applying strategies at your own college, this report will empower you to create a safer campus.
7. Higher Education in 2035
Higher education in the United States has reached a crossroads. Colleges buffeted by economic changes, political pressures, and dwindling public confidence must respond quickly while also playing the long game: They must plan now for imminent demographic shifts, rapid technological change, and an uncertain labor market. They are forced to consider: What can and should higher education be?
This collection of essays by leading experts offers a way forward. Deeply informed perspectives on the imminent future of the sector will enable college leaders to guide their institutions into a healthy, sustainable future, to determine their mission and to deliver on it.
8. Reimagining the Student Experience
Higher education is facing a staffing crisis. Recruitment, hiring, and retention have been persistent issues for the past few years, and the Covid-19 pandemic upended norms surrounding how academic institutions work – and what it means to work for an institution of higher education — putting the relationship between colleges and the staff members who work there under greater stress than ever before.
This in-depth report will examine the urgent challenges in how higher education can better manage this crucial part of its work force, and reflects insights from dozens of senior administrators, human-resources leaders, and hiring managers across higher education with original survey data from The Chronicle and Huron.
9. The Research Driven University
Research universities are the $90-billion heart of America’s vast, vigorous R&D enterprise. Learn how your institution can benefit from and contribute to tomorrow’s revolutionary innovations.
Readers of this report will better understand the scope of the American academic-research enterprise, the immense intellectual passion and imagination of university research scholars, the values that guide them, and the ways in which institutions can best strategize to align their research endeavors with their missions.