Developments, Volume 12, Issue 2 (Summer 2014)

Marisa Vernon
Columbus State Community College

Community Campus, Community Challenges

Open access was not a foreign concept to me when I stepped into an administrative position at a large, urban community college. Previous to my current position, I had faced challenges serving the masses at an open access regional campus of a public research institution. Through this experience, I became accustomed to motivating students with low placement scores, identifying resources for low-income students, and helping students remove the barriers that initially stood in between them and academic success. In fact, this type of challenging student affairs work was precisely the reason I zoned in on community college opportunities when the time came to take the next professional step.

Now, ...

Tadd Kruse
American University of Kuwait

Entering the new millennium and following the events of September 2001, the composition of higher education around the globe has seen significant growth and change. New opportunities for access to post-secondary learning continue to expand with the continual growth of institutions of higher learning, particularly in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.  Access for individuals to attain a quality education without leaving home is greater than ever before outside the United States, seeing increases in both foreign operated institutions and international branch campuses of universities.   The need for greater access to higher education and the means by which such access is administered have resulted in tremendous growth and unique shifts in how academic and ...

Jeffrey C. Sun
University of Louisville

Introduction

May colleges and universities use student data to enhance educational programming and student achievement?  Generally speaking, the answer is yes.

Let us start with a basic refresher on the legal definition of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).  FERPA is a federal privacy law protecting student education records.  The law requires postsecondary institutions to provide college students access to their education records and mandates privacy protections of such records.  In particular, the education records of concern are those deemed as personally identifiable information such as a student’s social security number, biometric information (e.g., fingerprints, voice prints, retina and iris patterns), and other identifying information.  The law, while aimed at protecting student privacy, is not as restrictive as some ...

At many universities the office of human resources typically offers generic employee evaluation forms for various classifications of non-academic employees that broadly measure their performance. Student Affairs employees are often evaluated against a set of standards that do not directly relate to their work. Our institution’s Student Affairs professionals have shared their difficulty in using our university’s generic evaluation tool in a meaningful way. The measured areas do not align to professional standards in Student Affairs, and the scale is not well defined and difficult to understand. Finally, many employees do not consider the scale easily applicable ...

There are several leadership development frameworks and theories that student affairs practitioners use on their campuses, such as the Social Change Model of Leadership and the Leadership Identity Development theory (Higher Education Research Institute, 1996; Komives, Longerbeam, Owen, Mainella, & Osteen, 2006; Komives, Wagner, & Associates, 2009; Kouzes & Posner, 2008; Komives, Lucas, & McMahon, 2013).  As more literature emerges, practitioners must realize that leadership development does not occur in isolation from other life processes (Dugan & Komives, 2010; Jones & Abes, 2013; Renn, 2003).  As practitioners design programs to develop college students’ leadership capacity, ...

Although we, the members of the Pan African Network (PAN), respect the decision of the jurors in the Zimmerman and Dunn trials, we are concerned about the implications of these decisions for Blacks in America, members of ACPA – College Student Educators ...