Deep Thoughts Articles Elder Academies – A New Population and Shift for Higher Education 07/03/202507/07/2025 I was recently pondering how higher education will adjust to the impending demographic cliff that begins in spring 2026 due to the massive drop in birth rate that started with…
Deep Thoughts Articles University Majors (at Universities) with the Greatest Negative Return on Investment 03/15/2025 2 Majors with lowest return on investment Music - 24% Theatre/Drama - 19% Universities with lowest return on investment Jewish Seminaries - 25% (They were 25 of the top 100…
Deep Thoughts Articles Why Freaking Out About AI Destroying Society is Not Wise 01/20/2025 Loved this section of an article by Mitch Colver, Vice President and Associate Provost for Engagement & Retention, American Public University System, on How GenAI is Forcing an Inevitable Ability/Efficiency…
Deep Thoughts Articles 50 Most Often Outsourced Services at Universities: 01/02/202501/02/2025 Thirty years ago in higher education, outsourcing was a curse word and only used at some universities in relation to food services and bookstores. Since that time, universities have realized…
Deep Thoughts Articles ~80 Ways Colleges Can Save Money without Sacrificing Quality 01/02/2025 When I taught graduate courses for Appalachian State University and Baylor University on the business and finance of higher education, one of the course sections that was essential to cover…
Deep Thoughts Articles A Straight Talk Survival Guide for Colleges, Peter Facione 01/02/2025 Sometimes I read an article that is just so good, I simply want to recreate it in a location where I can always easily find it to share. The following…
Deep Thoughts Articles 10 Main Outcome Measures of Universities 01/01/202501/02/2025 These are the 10 main areas where universities are accountable to themselves and others outside the university for their performance. Any board of regents/trustees and university leaders would be wise…
Deep Thoughts Articles 30 Colleges that Said Goodbye (Closed) in 2024 12/30/202412/30/2024 The U.S. lost ~30 non-profit universities last year. When I study the states, Pennsylvania led the way with 7 closures. New York and Illinois both lost 4 colleges, and Ohio…
Deep Thoughts Articles 120 Additional Sources of Revenue for Universities 12/30/202401/20/2025 Having taught a graduate course in the business and finance of higher education multiple times, I have learned there are many ways for colleges to make additional money that may…
Deep Thoughts Articles Colleges Most Likely to Close – Based on 2024 Forbes’ Financial Health Failing Grades 12/29/202401/08/2025 Having taught a class on Institutional Instability in 2019 and been a student of higher education for more than 30 years, I have a fascination with how and when colleges…
Deep Thoughts Articles Reflections on a Friend’s Untold Stories from their time at Baylor University 11/03/202411/04/2024 I began this reflection in an effort to encourage others to purchase and read Brittney Wardlaw’s new book about her time at Baylor University. However, in an effort to not…
Deep Thoughts Articles Predicting Closure of Religious Universities in TX & OK 08/18/202408/19/2024 Based on the number of times below that the three institutions were identified as struggling in what Gary Stocker and I consider to be important factors to university viability, I…
Deep Thoughts Articles 10 Themes for Why People Go To College 07/20/2024 I don't necessarily agree with all of these reasons, but an honest answer, based on 30 years working in colleges, leads me to share these 20 reasons. They are not…
Deep Thoughts Articles Top 50 Higher Education Consulting Companies 05/13/202406/01/2025 Growing up on 2 college campuses, earning a doctorate in the study of universities, publishing and professionally presenting on universities over 100 times, and working for the past 30 years…
Deep Thoughts Articles 170 Key Performance Indicators in Student Affairs 12/25/202309/04/2025 Having grown up with a scientist and professor for a father and a researcher and librarian for a mother, I became quite comfortable incorporating data and assessment into everything I…
Deep Thoughts Articles Selecting a College can be as Easy as Deciding Where to go to Dinner 11/29/202301/31/2024 Thousands of dollars are spent every year by parents trying to help their children find and get into the right college. This can be overwhelming as there are over 4,300…
Deep Thoughts Articles What is a Flagship Institution? 02/12/202305/01/2024 As I grow older, I have learned that the most conflicts most intractable are rooted in different understanding of words we use every day. Discrimination, fairness, equality, love – we…
Deep Thoughts Articles Composite Ranking of University Film School Rankings in US 02/03/202312/28/2023 Overview of the Rankings and Their Methodologies Use to Create this Table film-rankings-on-1-pageDownload
Deep Thoughts Articles… The Best University Film Programs – What do the Rankings Say? 02/03/202312/28/2023 A Metanalysis of Film Program Rankings in the U.S. - Spreadsheet of University Film Programs Rankings “Obviously there is no scientific formula to these prizes; it’s not like the movie…
Deep Thoughts Articles Have You Met My Institutional Friends? How Colleges Signal Value in Peer Identification 10/08/202212/28/2023 The explosion of access to data in recent years has revealed all types of interesting information. I have always been interested in knowing why certain institutions select the institutional peers…
Deep Thoughts Articles… Why a Focus on Organizational Performance Can Be More Important than Relationships with Students 08/15/202212/07/2023 A copy of this article appeared in EdSurge (reports on the people, ideas and tools shaping the future of learning) on August 1, 2022. Not All Student Affairs Staff are…
Deep Thoughts Articles Surrounded by Data – Starved for Meaning: Campus Crime Data in 2022 07/08/202212/07/2023 Part 1 of this article, The Unintended Consequences of Campus Crime Data, is also available. What’s Your Favorite Cheerios? If you had to choose between liberty and freedom versus constraint…
Deep Thoughts Articles The Unintended Consequences of Campus Crime Reporting 06/20/202212/07/2023 Part 2 of this article, Surrounded by Data but Starved for Meaning - Crime Data in 2022 is also available. Seeking Transparency and Accountability Jeanne Clery, a 19-year-old Lehigh University…
Deep Thoughts Articles An Attempt at Reporting on 25 Universities’ Post Graduation Success Data 05/18/202205/26/2022 Data table accompanying Part 3 of a 3 part series Select Notes on Table Placement Rate - (# students that have accepted a full time job) / (# students that…
Deep Thoughts Articles A Cursory Look at and Analysis of 25 Universities’ Placement/Success Data 05/18/202205/28/2022 (article #3 in 3 part series) If you would like context for my analysis below, I encourage you to read parts 1 and 2 of this 3 part series: 1.…
Deep Thoughts Articles Why Don’t Universities Obey Federal Requirements To Properly Document Post-Graduation Success? 05/18/202212/07/2023 (article #2 in a 3 part series) If you have not read part 1 of this article, Do Universities Really Care and Share What Happens to Students After College?, you…
Deep Thoughts Articles Why Don’t Universities Follow Federal Law To Document Post-Grad. Success? 05/18/202207/26/2024 If you have not read part 1 of this article, Do Universities Really Care and Share What Happens to Students After College?, you may want to do so to learn…
Deep Thoughts Articles Do Universities Really Care and Share What Happens to Students After College? 05/16/202208/12/2024 It was not until 1930 that the U.S. required all children to attend school from K-12. Thirty years ago another term emerged on the national consciousness, the “P-16” movement, which…
Deep Thoughts Articles How to Makes Sense of Executive Search Firms in Higher Education 04/26/202205/03/2022 This article was published on May 3, 2022 in University Business. Link to the table listing higher education search firm data collected for this article. Don’t Trust Your Gut Most…
Deep Thoughts Articles What’s Your Return on Investment to Your University? 04/13/202205/08/2025 I wrote this piece and was excited to see that University Business posted it on their website soon after - https://universitybusiness.com/whats-your-return-on-investment-to-your-university/ In the summer of 2019, after nine years, I…
Deep Thoughts Articles… A Hierarchy of Needs for Student Success 05/19/202112/07/2023 Over 75 years ago, at only the age of 35 years old, Abraham Maslow wrote a paper called “A Theory of Human Motivation,” in which he created the foundation for…
Deep Thoughts Articles Before You Make Your Final College Choice, Consider This 03/20/202101/09/2024 The following article was published in the Journal of College Admissions, Spring 2021 issue, on pages 15-17, and titled, "The Economics of Comparisons." I would like to make you a…
Deep Thoughts Articles Worried that Your Desired College Might Close? Don’t Be. 09/02/202001/06/2024 This article was published in a similar format by Road2College on August 9, 2020. The News on Colleges Has Not Been Good Recently The past few months there have been…
Deep Thoughts Articles Should We Believe Scott Galloway’s Predictions of Soon-to-Perish Colleges? 08/08/202002/06/2022 What Did Scott Galloway Do on July 17? On Friday, July 17, in an article on his website titled USS University, Scott Galloway published a list of 89 colleges that…
Deep Thoughts Articles Colleges Must Adapt or Be Left Behind 07/24/202002/06/2022 (this article was also published in a shortened format in University Business) Integrating the use of online video to improve and expand education was the focus of “The Greatest Shift…
Deep Thoughts Articles The Greatest Shift in Learning Ever? 07/22/202002/06/2022 What do the following companies have in common: General Electric, Disney, Microsoft, Netflix, Airbnb? They share the same thing in common as Texas A&M, University of Michigan, University of North…
Deep Thoughts Articles The Second Wave is Coming and the Amplifier Could be Our Colleges 06/02/202002/06/2022 Is It Really a New Normal? Our nation has been dealing with COVID-19 for three months now and the nation-wide quarantine has been lifting one state at a time. As…
Deep Thoughts Articles Why Social Distancing for College Students is Not Going to be Easy 05/22/202002/06/2022 College students are known for making decisions without fully understanding the impact of the long-term consequences. The first table below provides evidence to back up this claim. The second table…
Deep Thoughts Articles Our Universities are Ships and We’re in a Raging Storm: COVID-19’s Impact on Colleges Told through an Analogy 05/19/202002/06/2022 On May 14, Steven Dubner shared the newest episode of his podcast, Freakonomics, titled, “418. What Will College Look Like in the Fall (and Beyond)?” In it, Dubner interviewed three…
Deep Thoughts Articles There is One Secret Not Being Explored In Order to Secure the Fall 2020 Class 05/12/202002/06/2022 Incoming Students Crave Connection to Each Other Graduating from the college in the early 1990s, I remember thinking (more like mourning) that almost all of my college friends were married…
Deep Thoughts Articles Helping Students to Succeed in College by Learning to Ride a Bike (Part 2) 02/04/202002/06/2022 Ideally, you will have read Part 1 of this post before before reading this entry. In the first post, the Significant 7 factors for student success before and in the…
Deep Thoughts Articles Helping Students to Succeed in College by Learning to Ride a Bike – Part 1 02/04/202007/07/2024 An Analogy of College Student Success There are thousands of articles and hundreds of books on the topic of college student success. For the past 28 years, I have read…
Deep Thoughts Articles The University Family Argument 12/28/201909/26/2024 Once upon a time, there was a loving family living in College Town, U.S.A. They gathered regularly to watch football, celebrate a homecoming, and to say goodbye to graduates of…
Deep Thoughts on Higher Ed and Life 