Some professors believe Wikipedia has no place in the footnotes of a college paper. But could it have a place on the syllabus? The Wikimedia Foundation , the nonprofit organization that does fundraising and back-end support for the popular open-source encyclopedia, says yes. So do the nine professors at prominent colleges who have agreed to make creating, augmenting, and editing Wikipedia entries part of their students’ coursework. “We’ve known for a long time that students are the fuel of Wikipedia,” said LiAnna Davis, a Wikimedia spokeswoman. “{hellip}We feel there is a place for Wikipedia in the classroom.” ON THE WEB: A stand against Wikipedia MORE FROM INSIDE HIGHER ED: Research methods ‘beyond Google’ “Students have access to so many journals and library materials and other scholarly materials that other people just don’t have access to,” she said. Wikimedia’s new alliances with professors stem from its Public Policy Initiative, an effort to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of topics relating to U.S. public policy. On a grant from the Stanton Foundation, Wikimedia started recruiting public policy professors who were willing to have their students create content for Wikipedia. This fall, the foundation will help nine instructors — four at George Washington University , two at Georgetown University , and one each at Indiana University at Bloomington, Syracuse University , and Harvard University — integrate Wikipedia-related assignments into their syllabuses. (Wikimedia does not pay the professors to do this; the Stanton grant pays for foundation staff and training associated with the project.) “The social media trend is something that students have definitely latched on to, and regardless of what everyone else thinks, they’re going to continue to be involved with it,” says Carol Ann Dwyer, a public affairs instructor at Syracuse , who is among Wikimedia’s academic recruits. “I would prefer, particularly if they’re going to become ‘Wikipedians,’ that they do it properly.” The foundation also recruited student “ambassadors” at those colleges to serve as on-campus resources for professors and students who might be less familiar with the technical aspects of contributing to Wikipedia. It gathered the ambassadors in Washington this summer for three days of training. The foundation also recruited “online ambassadors” — experienced Wikipedia users from around the world — to serve as a second line of support, especially for students who might need help while burning the midnight oil the night before a due date. The particular ways the professors are planning to work Wikipedia into their courses vary. The graduate students in Peter Linquiti’s policy analysis course at George Washington will be asked to pen a detailed critique of an existing entry, assessing its “credibility, intended audience, currency of content, degree of support for the information and analysis, use of policy analysis tools or concepts, extent of balance and/or bias, and any recommended changes to content, style, and tone,” according to a summary provided to Wikimedia. They will then submit appropriate edits to the entry, and then monitor those edits for a week to see what happens to those changes in the fray of editing and counter-editing that is a common byproduct of the site’s wild-west revisions policy. Rochelle Davis, an assistant professor in the school of foreign service at Georgetown, says contributing to Wikipedia dovetails nicely with the sort of literature review and summarizing that she already has students do as part of preparing to write an argumentative paper. Davis says she plans to simply have the students in two of her classes format those summaries for Wikipedia, submit them to the site, then use that as a jumping-off point for writing a proper research paper. In this way, the process mirrors a strategy already employed by many college students, only in reverse: Instead of starting with a Wikipedia page as a nexus to find more authoritative material, the students would do research first, then consolidate their findings into a concise entry on the site. “I’m tired of my grad students saying, ‘All we ever do is critique and discuss and deconstruct,’ ” Davis says. “So I’m going to make them create something that’s not just a thing for me to read; it’s going to go out into the community.” The fact that summarizing for Wikipedia comes with the pressure of knowing others might read and rely on their work might even prompt students to be more meticulous than they might have if the summaries were for Davis’s eyes only, she says. Several other people involved with the project made the same point. The tower and the crowd Academe historically has viewed Wikipedia, which allows any visitor to edit its entries and relies on the vigilance of volunteer fact-checkers, with a great deal of ambivalence. In 2007, the history department at Middlebury College took a stand against citing Wikipedia entries directly in papers, and many others have worried that Wikipedia sows the same moral hazard in students as Google by enabling, by virtue of its breadth and convenience, lazy research habits. A study published earlier this year in the online journal First Monday reported that more than half of college students use Wikipedia at some point in the research process either all or most of the time (though their professors might be relieved to hear that 70% of those students use it at or near the beginning of their research). In recent years, academics seem to have gotten used to Wikipedia being around (and have perhaps recognized its efforts to keep out bad information), and much of the discussion has shifted to how it can be applied constructively. The professors who have partnered with Wikimedia’s Public Policy Initiative are not the first to incorporate Wikipedia into their courses — the foundation counts 59 such instances between 2007 and 2009 — and academics have certainly played a role in helping build and edit the site since it opened in 2001. The initiative does, however, represent the first time the foundation has pushed to seed a community of contributors within higher education. “This is exciting to be sure!” wrote Curtis J. Bonk, a professor of instructional systems technology at Indiana and author of The World Is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education , in an e-mail to Inside Higher Ed. “That is a key part the mission of all of us in a higher education setting — to generate as well as disseminate knowledge in different disciplines,” Bonk wrote. “Given that Wikipedia is now central to the knowledge dissemination process as well as the linkages between content and fields, such partnerships are make sense.” But for as much that the academic cloisters and the ?ber-democratic site might have to offer each other, there remains intractable philosophical tension between the two that could foil the collaboration. Linquiti’s exercise of having students track the changes made to their entries by the equally empowered masses hints at the vulnerability of their contributions. The mutability of Wikipedia entries is why Neil Waters, a history professor at Middlebury, still forbids his students from citing them. In its guidelines, Waters points out, Wikipedia instructs visitors to “Be bold in updating articles and do not worry about making mistakes” — hardly a scholarly protocol, he argues. “I want my students to worry about making mistakes, and to learn how to avoid them, and how to take responsibility for what they write,” wrote Waters in an e-mail. Alan Liu, chair of the English department at the University of California at Santa Barbara and author of the popular academic blog Voice of the Shuttle, noted the importance of resolving these process issues if academe wants to make its authoritative voice louder in Wikipedia. “The academic community provides a constrained and relatively standard set of protocols for constructive collaboration and refereeing that could be built on (whereas the larger global community behind Wikipedia was more problematic because there is actually no such thing as a global community with sufficiently shared motives and standards of collaboration),” wrote Liu in an e-mail. Much remains to be hashed out between academics and the general public as far as working out such “standards of collaboration,” he said, to resolve the tension between the academic value of peer review and the social media value of crowd-sourcing. “New policies, institutional arrangements, practices, protocols, and technologies will need to be created on both sides of the divide” — between higher education and the “foundations of networked public knowledge” such as Wikipedia and Google — “to create productive and socially-good ways for experts and the crowd to teach, and learn from, each other,” said Liu.” As a handful of loose alliances between Wikimedia and professors, the project “does not seem complete enough.” Wikimedia says it plans to recruit 15 more professors by the spring, and hopes to expand the collaborations beyond public policy eventually. “We are trying to develop a model, a body of documentation, and some technical tools and Wikipedia community processes that will be useful around the globe and in a variety of topic areas; and we hope to set into motion something that will be self-sustaining by volunteer and academic groups,” Frank Schulenberg, head of public outreach at Wikimedia, wrote in a statement. “While we are working only with U.S.-based public policy programs during the pilot program, we will also be continually seeking opportunities to engage our Wikimedia chapters, professors, students, and Wikipedians in other parts of the world and in other topic areas.”

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A movement is underway to make it easier for entrepreneurs to navigate the lucrative and sometimes-tricky education market and introduce new technology and products into classrooms. An educator at the University of Pennsylvania wants to create one of the nation’s only business incubators dedicated to education entrepreneurs. The U.S. Department of Education is also getting into the act with a $650 million fund to boost education innovation. “Here’s this (market) that is huge, that is really important, that needs innovation, and there’s just nothing out there to sort of foster it,” said Doug Lynch, vice dean of Penn’s Graduate School of Education. “Let’s create a Silicon Valley around education.” K-12 schools and degree-granting institutions spend more than $1 trillion on education annually, federal statistics show. That represents immense potential for entrepreneurs — if they can resist the lure of more established tech firms and trendier ventures like social networks. There are other roadblocks. Despite constant talk of making U.S. students more competitive, Lynch said it can be nearly impossible to introduce a new product in the fractured K-12 market because of frequent changes in superintendents, policy and curricula. Each of the nation’s 15,000 school districts has its own needs and often cumbersome purchasing process. “It’s worse than trying to sell to the U.S. Army, in terms of the hoops you have to jump through,” Lynch said. The incubator he envisions at Penn — called NEST, for Networking Ed entrepreneurs for Social Transformation — would identify promising businesses and give them financial and logistical support, such as access to capital, work space and university expertise. Linking educational researchers, who tend to be theoretical, with entrepreneurs, who are more practical and action-oriented, could help unlock the market, said Kim Smith, co-founder of the NewSchools Venture Fund, which invests in education businesses. “If they can figure out a way to bridge those two communities, it could be a real contribution,” said Smith, now CEO of Bellwether Education Partners. Penn, an Ivy League university in Philadelphia, has already held two summits on education entrepreneurship and hosted its first business plan competition, sponsored by the school and the Milken Family Foundation. The top prize went to Digital Proctor, which creators say can identify typists through keystroke biometrics and thereby make it easier for teachers to root out test fraud. Digital Proctor beat out competitors from 27 states and three countries to win $25,000. In an interview, Digital Proctor CEO Shaun Sims said investors’ lack of familiarity with the education industry means entrepreneurs must make a double pitch: first on the market overall, then on the actual product they’ve developed. An incubator would “create an ecosystem for education” that attracts entrepreneurs who might otherwise venture into more investment-friendly efforts, he said. “You’re going to get the country’s best talent working in this market instead of going to Silicon Valley working on the next social network,” Sims said. The U.S. Department of Education hopes to bolster entrepreneurship with its Investing in Innovation fund. Jim Shelton, assistant deputy secretary for the Office of Innovation and Improvement, said it is easier than ever for schools to use new ideas and products because of increasing Internet connectivity, cheaper technology and the growing use of hard data to measure outcomes. “The shift toward evidence as the currency for education … will make it a much more rational market,” Shelton said. “It will be much easier for entrepreneurs to prove that what they have is what people should be spending time and money on.” Arizona State University is also embracing the emerging field. It held its first education entrepreneur summit last spring and has started discussions with Penn for some kind of partnership, said Julia Rosen, associate vice president for innovation and entrepreneurship. Arizona State’s business incubator, SkySong, has all types of companies but is intensifying its focus on education businesses because of the “incredible market potential,” Rosen said. “Individual consumers are increasingly willing to pay for education, whether it’s lifelong learning, private schools, tutoring (or) test prep,” she said. “We think education is going to be the next health care.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Since Michael Crow was named president of Arizona State University eight years ago, the university has increasingly organized itself with an eye toward attacking some of the world’s greatest challenges. Rather than divide an institution into academic departments – those are just “social constructs,” he’d argue – Crow has pushed for new cross-disciplinary organizational structures that are defined by the problems faculty seek to solve – reforming K-12 education, for instance – rather than the disciplines of those who will try to solve them. “The standard rigid model is ossified,” Crow says with something approaching disdain. The “rigid” structures that have come to define academe are targets for Crow, a much-watched university president who sounds as if he’d like to take a sledgehammer to the kinds of colleges and schools that exist at most institutions across the country, including, for the most part, Arizona State. Crow’s philosophy is playing out across the four campuses that comprise Arizona State, where nine traditional engineering departments were recently combined into five schools. The new groupings include the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy, which gobbled up the departments of aerospace, chemical, materials science and mechanical engineering. In so combining the disciplines, Arizona State officials argue they are forcing faculty out of silos and making them work together for the greater good. They concede, however, that there’s still not much evidence to suggest whether Arizona State is really transforming or merely rebranding. “I think it’s a very valid question,” says Paul Johnson, executive dean of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. “And for somebody who wants the hard data and the objective study of whether we really did something different, we’re probably a couple of years away from that.” Other manifestations of Crow’s approach can be found in the School of Evolution and Social Change, which replaced the university’s anthropology department with an expanded home for mathematicians, political scientists, geographers and sociologists who are trying – to quote the school’s stated mission – “to discover not only who we were but where we are going and how we may alter our destiny.” The grand rhetoric that defines the School of Evolution and Social Change is mirrored in other new schools that have emerged during Crow’s tenure. The School of Earth and Space Exploration, for instance, describes itself as “dedicated to expanding the frontiers of knowledge through the exploration of Earth, space, matter, time and life.” The Crow years have been so transformative that the university’s chief research officer describes the time that predated Crow’s tenure as “the BC era” (Before Crow). “Sometimes you feel people have rhetoric but there isn’t substance to it,” says Sethuraman (Panch) Panchanathan, deputy vice president of the university’s office of knowledge enterprise development. “I was amazed by [Crow's] intellect, his passion, and it was very clear to me he meant what he said.” While “the jury is still out” on whether Arizona State’s approach will pay off, Panchanathan already sees some positive signs. He notes, for instance, that the university’s research expenditures have tripled under Crow, growing from about $120 million in 2001 to $370 million in 2010. In an era when many research universities saw huge gains, however, those figures still pale in comparison to the types of expenditures churned out by the nation’s foremost research workhorses, which are often presumed to be the institutions best poised to really solve the world’s most vexing problems. In a 2008 ranking of the top-20 universities by research expenditures, none fell below $580 million, the National Science Foundation reported. Approach not without risk If Arizona State’s model is to gain acceptance or adoration, there are plenty of questions left to answer. Does renaming departments and organizing around cross-disciplinary problems really produce better research or better students? Can a broadened curriculum be designed without skimping on depth? Can professors from different disciplines agree on expectations for a tenure candidate whose scholarship combines elements as various as computer science and dance? Charles Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering, says the questions surrounding Arizona State’s approach are numerous and may be unanswered for some time. While the ideas are interesting, “It is an experiment,” he says. “There’s nothing that guarantees it’s going to work.” “I think they’re very idealistic, and they’re trying to make a radical shift, and they know it,” says Vest, former president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “They see [this approach] as a path to leapfrog, but it’s an experiment and it’s got a big risk.” The risk, Vest says, is that Arizona State will invest a lot of time, money and energy turning the academy on its head without producing tangible results, such as better research and the improved employability of students who are necessarily coming out of an experimental program. That said, the changes aren’t being dismissed as mere rebranding, Vest says. “I have not heard people talk about smoke and mirrors, and I think the reason is they’ve attracted enough clearly substantive people,” he says. “Does everybody assume this is the future and they’re going to be ahead of everybody else? No, I don’t think so.” In pursuit of “substantive people,” the university has mined traditional academic powerhouses to find leaders for its new programs. Kip Hodges, for instance, left MIT in 2006 to become the founding director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration. While Crow often defines Arizona State against traditional colleges – we don’t all have to be the same way, he often argues – Hodges says it’s not inconsistent that the university’s contrarian president still recruits talent from institutions that fit traditional standards of academic excellence. “It would be a better or more sustainable position, let’s say, to say that we don’t need the imprimatur, the blessing of those people at the other [traditionally elite research] universities,” Hodges says. “But what Michael’s trying to do – and everybody at the university is not Michael, of course – but what Michael is trying to say is you can play with the big boys and you can attract people from the big boys by doing things in a different way.” Hodges, who spent 23 years at MIT as a professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences, says he struggled while there to bring scientists and engineers together in meaningful ways. He saw an opening, however, to do just that at Arizona State in a new school specifically designed for such collaboration. Indeed, Hodges came on with none-too-uncertain orders to recruit faculty – lots of them – from multiple disciplines, including astrophysics, cosmology, earth and space education, earth system science, planetary science and systems engineering. “I thought it was a really radically new way to look at things, and I was convinced enough of that that I drank the Kool-Aid and came to ASU at that point,” he says. The very fact that Arizona State lacks the elite status of a place like MIT may actually be an advantage when trying to do something different, Hodges says. “Turning a big successful university like MIT is a little like turning the Queen Mary,” he says. “It’s very difficult to get people to play in that possibility space.” That’s not to say, however, that a lot of universities of varying size and research status don’t encourage cross-disciplinary research, often through the establishment of centers and institutes. Indeed, it’s hard to find one that doesn’t. What’s different about Arizona State, however, is the degree to which the university has embraced the notion that new organizational structures may be necessary to break down silos. Students and faculty at many institutions, for instance, would likely scoff at the idea that departments needed to be killed off to encourage professors to work together. Pamela Matson, dean of Stanford University’s School of Earth Sciences, says she’s been impressed by the manner in which Arizona State has gone all-in on a systematic restructuring in service to transdisciplinary research and teaching. “They are going after this at a scale and rate that is beyond what most universities are doing, and that’s partly because they have the leadership of the university president,” says Matson, who is on an advisory board for Arizona State’s Global Institute of Sustainability. While Matson sees innovation at Arizona State, she’s not ready to anoint the university as the lone trailblazer in a pack of otherwise stagnant institutions. In the area of sustainability, for instance, Matson counts Stanford, the University of Minnesota and the University of California at Berkeley as other truly innovative institutions that have harnessed the talents of faculty from disparate disciplines in pursuit of common goals. “[Arizona State has] gone further out probably than other universities in sort of challenging the structure of the university to do this,” says Matson, a professor of environmental studies at Stanford and a senior fellow in the Woods Institute for the Environment. “On the other hand, I think there are a lot of ways of doing this that might have the same levels of success.” Crow was viewed by many as an innovator before he ever came on the scene at Arizona State, but his lofty ideas have historically had mixed success. As executive vice provost of Columbia University , Crow played an instrumental role in ushering in a much-ballyhooed project called Fathom. The for-profit online learning platform, which was designed to sell Columbia faculty lectures to the public, cost the university millions before financial difficulties proved its undoing. Crow was also a key supporter of “Biosphere 2,” a giant Columbia-supported terrarium that became the butt of jokes and even inspired a a Pauly Shore movie. The university abandoned its involvement with the project in 2003. Humanities find place in mix When Crow waxes philosophical about Arizona State’s grand plans, he often expresses a desire to “make the sciences less boring.” To that end, Crow’s stump speech is often more about going to space or building cool stuff to save the world than it is about the mechanics behind it. This reporter, for instance, has never heard him mention calculus. That said, the sciences in general are often front and center for Crow, raising another question: Where do the humanities fit into this experiment? To hear it from faculty, the humanities actually fit pretty well within Crow’s vision. The university’s Department of English — yes, it’s still a “department” — is hiring faculty and reducing student/faculty ratios. There’s also a recently developed School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies that aims to “mold global citizens with democratic values.” If the humanities aren’t always on the tip of Crow’s tongue, it doesn’t mean they don’t have a place in his heart, says Sally L. Kitch, founding director of the Institute for Humanities Research. “No, I don’t think he does [talk about the humanities as much]. Can he be reminded? Yes,” says Kitch, a professor of women and gender studies. “I see a lot of my role [as keeping] the humanities in his purview. But I think his juices got flowing around what he sees in the sciences, and he continues to see that more easily.” Neal A. Lester, chair of the Department of English, agrees that his department has not been left behind while the sciences are growing. That said, he is sensitive to the frequent proclamation that departments are, by their very nature, fossils of a bygone era. That kind of thinking fails to capture that English professors have long worked across disciplines, well before schools became the hot trend in Arizona, Lester says. Indeed, Lester says he recalls once telling an administrator his concerns about quotations in a local news story that seemed to imply the schools were “more progressive” than the rest of the campus. “I’m hoping people aren’t perceiving that schools are something more cutting-edge than a department,” Lester says. Finances a motivation, too For all of the talk about a collective mission at Arizona State, there’s no doubt that budget cuts have a place in conversations about combining or eliminating departments. The university’s state budget has been cut by about $105 million or 20% since 2008. While tenure and tenure-track faculty positions have been protected, the university has eliminated 1,210 positions, of which 713 were layoffs. Richard Stanley, senior vice president and university planner, says the reorganizations have led to hundreds of positions being eliminated. Multiple administrative units that once governed history, religious studies, philosophy and three colleges of education, to name a few examples, have been crammed into single interdisciplinary units with fewer staff, he says. That said, Stanley and others argue that finances weren’t the core motivation for most of the reorganizations. “We haven’t put together any units that don’t make sense just for finding administrative savings,” he says. Many of the new units, however, are counting on growing — not just sustaining their numbers. Stanley says hiring will continue, even if it happens at a slower pace than administrators envisioned years ago. Tenure criteria being hammered out Even for those who have embraced Arizona State’s emphasis on breaking down traditional departmental structures and reorganizing in ways that promote interdisciplinary problem solving, there are still plenty of practical hurdles left to cross. If the focus of the institution is changing, should not the criteria for tenure as well? That’s become an increasingly perplexing question across the university, and there’s still considerable debate about how to best address it. “It’s been the most difficult part of my job to make that work effectively,” Hodges says. As would be expected, professors from varied disciplines bring different expertise and different expectations to a tenure debate. The School of Earth and Space Exploration is home to both earth scientists and astrophysicists, and “there are real culture differences between those two,” Hodges says. While earth scientists might complete one postdoctoral position for two years before landing a junior faculty position, astrophysicists often do two or three “postdocs” before they reach the same point on the faculty ladder. Consequently, an astrophysicist is likely to have a much longer record of publications than someone coming out of earth science. In a truly interdisciplinary school, however, professors from both disciplines would naturally evaluate each other for the awarding of tenure. Helping professors understand and respect the differing expectations of foreign disciplines remains a work in progress, as does reaching common ground on how those differences should inform scholarly expectations for the awarding of tenure, Hodges says. “It’s a difficult cultural shift with some people, I am sure,” he says. “I don’t mean to imply that every single faculty member we have has no problem with this brave new world. They are skeptical, and they have a long history of academia that’s on their side.” That long history also includes a mutual understanding of what departments and disciplines mean. So what happens when those boundaries disappear? Will a graduate of a nebulous new program be able to convince more traditional colleagues that he has the chops to hang with the best and brightest in his field? Johnson concedes that some faculty starting their careers in the Fulton Schools of Engineering are asking that very question. “What I have heard is some of the junior faculty will talk to their adviser at another school who will say ‘I don’t know what’s going on because you no longer are part of an identifiable structure,’ ” Johnson says. “The fact that we don’t have something called a chemical engineering department, someone might say ‘It must not be important there.’ ” But doing away with departments has not meant doing away with degrees. The Fulton Schools still offer all of the ABET-accredited programs they did before reorganizing, because “We felt that it was important for our engineering graduates to have identities and qualit[ies] that are recognized by employers,” Johnson wrote in an e-mail. What has changed, however, is an increasing emphasis on creating new “concentrations” within the traditional degree programs. A student working toward a civil engineering degree, for instance, might now also have a concentration in “sustainable engineering.” A hallmark of the new approach in engineering is developing curriculums that will encourage students and faculty to help confront a series of “grand challenges” laid out by the National Academy of Engineering. Those challenges include, among others, making solar energy more economical and providing access to clean water. The approach in engineering is mirrored in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, which is working to establish itself as a force for improving teacher preparedness. That mission has been buoyed by a nearly $19 million gift from T. Denny Sanford , a South Dakota philanthropist and University of Minnesota alumnus. Sanford’s donation created a partnership between Arizona State and Teach for America , which recruits recent college graduates to teach in urban schools for a minimum of two years. “TFA makes teaching a profession of choice, and that’s exactly what it should be,” says Mary Koerner, the college’s dean. “Our motto should be, ‘If you can’t get into teaching, become a lawyer.’ ” The partnership with TFA, however, may highlight one of the vulnerabilities to Arizona State’s stated desire to solve complex problems: There may be more than one way to solve them. While TFA is not without fervent supporters, critics have charged that it infuses city schools with inexperienced teachers, who work for only a short time at entry-level salaries – squeezing out their more experienced counterparts. TFA officials and school administrators who hire TFA alumni dispute that characterization, but its critics persist. “TFA isn’t telling us what to do and they’re not going to dictate our academic program,” Koerner says. “I think one of the reasons faculty have not rebelled against this is that we are looking together at how this makes sense for our college. Nothing will be prescribed.” If faculty are increasingly receptive to new directions – Koerner’s college has been reorganized twice in the last year – it’s no doubt attributable in part to the fact that a critical mass of new professors have come into the institution knowing full well that Arizona State is trying to be a different kind of place. In other words, Crow is building an army of believers one professor at a time, and boy, is he hiring. Indeed, the university raised about $59 million for faculty hiring during Crow’s first seven years as president. “People are attracted to ASU because they want to do this kind of work,” Koerner says. “I don’t think we’d tap someone on the shoulder and say ‘You know, I think you’re not relevant anymore.’ I think if someone felt irrelevant they would probably leave.” Those who have bought into Crow’s vision are a special lot, Koerner says, willing to work in a place where they know things could change drastically at a moment’s notice. “Having an opportunity to define this place is pretty seductive for a lot of people; it is for me,” she says. “What do you have to give up? This is a pretty dynamic place; you have to be able to live with ambiguity.”

One quick way to tell what kind of year colleges are having as far as the admissions “yield” — the percentage of accepted applicants who put down deposits — is to see how forgiving they are of the U.S. Postal Service . Those that are having a good year assume that everything postmarked through May 1 — the standard date to accept admissions offers — should have arrived by now. Others are convinced that one more clump of deposits is about to arrive — and aren’t willing to declare final numbers just yet. Yield tends to be most crucial these days for private colleges that are not in the uppermost stratosphere of endowment and prestige. Many public colleges are bulging and not particularly worried about filling their seats. The Ivies are still the Ivies when it comes to attracting students — and having generous aid packages to help them out. But for most private institutions, including many at which admission is highly competitive, this is the make-or-break time when they find out if their incoming class is likely to be consistent with their academic and budget plans for the year. While many of those still waiting on the next postal delivery are likely to be disappointed with their yields and aren’t providing details yet, a few trends are emerging among those colleges that are having successful years. Generally, these shifts in thinking about yield go beyond just making sure that accepted applicants have a good experience on a campus visit (although that is of course still part of it and continues to be refined). What are some of the key issues influencing yield this year? EARLY DECISION: Many regret choice COLLEGE ADMISSIONS: 30-point SAT bump can pay off big TO FRIEND OR NOT TO FRIEND? Admissions in the age of Facebook • More discussion (and strategies) based on the idea that many colleges don’t have one yield, but in fact have several, for particular groups of students — by where they live or the programs that are attracting them. • More student interest (and tuition-paying parent interest) in career prospects. • More of an emphasis on identifying in the admissions process students who really want to enroll — and a willingness to reject some outstanding applicants rather than let them reject the college (bringing down the yield). • More of an emphasis on attracting groups of students — whether Latinos from the United States or Chinese students from overseas — to the application and deposit pool. • More of an emphasis on using techniques other than money to attract students to some campuses — while money is still the favored tool at other campuses (especially those that had an off year last year). ON THE WEB: Another increase for early decision AT INSIDE HIGHER ED: The real costs of merit aid Careers and cost Here is how yield is looking at some campuses that are pleased this year. Misericordia University, in Pennsylvania, has as one of its tools to attract students a billboard that says: “Nursing: the recession-proof career.” The message isn’t subtle, but it is part of how the institution has been attracting students to its health professions programs, which in the last year went from representing 49% of incoming students to 56%. Yield is about 35%, up 2 points from last year. But Glenn Bozinski, director of admissions, said he’s really dealing with a range of different yields because some of his programs can grow and others can’t. In all of the health professions programs, he said, the university is maxed out on clinical spots it can provide in clinics and hospitals for training that is required by various accreditors. He easily could have enrolled 100 freshmen in the physical therapy program based on their academic credentials, but he only admitted toward a target of 66 because that’s the number the university can provide with clinical spots. In business (in which student interest is dropping) and liberal arts fields, he said, he could easily admit more students because the university has the faculty members and classrooms it needs — and doesn’t have to find clinical rotations. Career prospects are a big deal for more students, he said. “We hear parents say, ‘I will send my son to a state school for the ubiquity of many majors there. They can get their history degree or psychology degree there.’ But you don’t hear that with the health sciences.” Across the state, Mike Frantz, vice president of enrollment at Robert Morris University, is also looking at vastly different yields for different programs. For those undecided on majors, the yield this year is 12.5% — up a few percentage points from last year. But in mechanical engineering, the yield is nearly 25%. In actuarial sciences, the yield is 36.9%. Over all, the university is thrilled “beyond our wildest dreams” because those numbers for the year — in which overall yield is 17.6%, down less than a point — come from a much larger applicant pool and more admittances. Applications were up 40%. The key, Frantz said, was that the college bought names of prospective students at the beginning of their senior year in high school. In the past, Robert Morris stopped buying new names when students reached their junior year, a common practice, feeling that potential students would be identified by then. “But the vast majority of our new applicants, and many of our new students, came from these pools, whose names aren’t being purchased traditionally,” he said. At the University of Vermont — a public university that, due to its unusually large out-of-state enrollment, has an admissions operation that competes with the privates — officials noticed the impact of economic uncertainty not by applicants’ intended majors but by the differing patterns of those from Vermont and those outside the state (who pay more). Yield is typically higher for those from within Vermont, and that didn’t change. But state residents committed very quickly after being admitted, while those from out of state took their time and sent in their deposits only in the final days before the deadline. Over all, the in-state yield increased to 42% from 38%, while the out-of-state rate increased to 17% from 16%. Christopher Lucier, vice president for enrollment management at Vermont, said he saw a combination of interests in discussions with prospective students and families. “It was a combination of what we were able to do with financial aid packages and the quality of the institution. The issue of value is continuing to emerge,” he said. Based on the higher yields, the university doesn’t plan to admit anyone off the waiting list. Last year, it let in more than 300 students that way. At the City University of New York (which doesn’t hold to the May 1 deadline used by private colleges), applications are continuing to go up at such a fast rate that the system has decided that those who don’t apply by Friday will be placed on a waiting list — a first in recent years. Applications are running more than 25% ahead of just two years ago. Judging applicant interest For some years now, many colleges have paid attention not just to the quality of applicants, but to how interested they really seem to be. No one, after all, wants to be treated like a safety school. And so many colleges pay attention to factors such as whether an applicant visits the campus to measure such interest. This year — as part of strategies to increase yield — some colleges are taking that approach to new levels. Augustana College is looking at a yield of 27% this year, up from 23%, and part of that is attributed to new ways to measure applicant interest, said W. Kent Barnds, vice president of enrollment, communication and planning. The college called the first 1,000 students accepted and ranked them on their interest in the college — and then focused further recruitment efforts and some extra financial aid on students who seemed truly interested. The college was “more aggressive” on putting applicants on a waiting list or asking for more information if there was some sense that they might not really be interested. “We continually qualified the pool to focus our resources and be more efficient,” he said. At the University of Rochester, where yield is up by about 2 percentage points and the discount rate is down a few percentage points, Jonathan Burdick, dean of admissions and financial aid, described the year as “obscenely good” for the institution. And one key was taking a new, hard line with those applicants who weren’t interested. While he doesn’t have numbers, he said that the university made a conscious decision to either place on the waiting list or outright reject those students who — when asked to describe why they are applying — “spend 15 seconds at midnight to take what they wrote about Tufts and then put our name in it.” Burdick said that it was a matter of “having the confidence to say that we don’t care if this kid is 4.0 and has 1500 SATs. We want the students who are interested in us.” He said that he suspected some of those rejected are probably “in disbelief” about the decision, but he would rather focus on recruiting those who really want to come. What are the trends among those who did want to come this year? He noticed — and can’t yet explain — more students interested in several of the social sciences. Most years, he said, the university ends up admitting three or four students each who say they want to major in anthropology or linguistics. This year, those intended majors are in double digits. Some of the increase, he said, is coming from Chinese students who in the past have tended to want to major only in economics or finance, but are branching out to a range of social sciences. But he said that American students are also a key part of the trend. Meredith College, a women’s college in North Carolina, enrolled its largest freshman class ever last year (477) and expects to end up a little lower than that this year. But it has noticed an increase in international applications (and deposits). Generally colleges are reporting more interest from undergraduate international applications this year, not just grad students. The college is also seeing success in efforts to diversify. For the fall class, about 138 applicants (out of 1,553 total) are from Latinas. And while the applicant total over all has been flat, the number of Latina applicants has been rising, from 104 last year and 67 the year before. At a time of concern in Arizona (and at North Carolina’s community colleges) about applicants who may not have legal immigration status, Meredith says simply that its totals include documented and undocumented students, and that the college is proud of the outreach that is attracting the students. (As the application numbers have grown, the admit rate has hovered above 60% for Latinas, and the yield in the 30-40% range.) Case Western Reserve University is also reporting more success on diversity. While yield is holding steady, with an applicant pool that was 20% larger, the commitments to enroll by black, Latino and Native American students are up by 60%. Success with and without more aid One of the big questions facing private colleges and universities is how much aid they need to add to woo students — especially those who may be considering generous offers elsewhere, or less expensive public institutions. Some colleges this year are reporting success without engaging in bidding wars — even as they eye other colleges offering very good packages. Robert J. Massa, vice president for communications at Lafayette College , said yield is up — to 29% from 27% — while the discount rate is down, to 32% from 35.5%. So while the college gives generous aid packages, that reflects a yield that was higher among those who weren’t offered financial aid than for whose who were offered assistance. Massa credited “beefed up” yield activities and also what seemed a slight uptick in family confidence levels about the economy. Steven T. Syverson, vice president for enrollment at Lawrence University, said that his institution introduced some modest (generally $2,000-$4,000) awards for applicants interested in certain themes, such as global perspectives, environmental awareness and community engagement. And Lawrence already has a few merit scholarships — up to a maximum of $15,000. Syverson said he was struck by the number of $25,000-a-year awards applicants were reporting from competing institutions — especially from others in the Midwest. Syverson said he wasn’t sure about the strategy, and how it would work economically or academically (he wasn’t impressed by the quality of some of the recipients of these offers). While refusing to go down that road, Syverson said, Lawrence’s numbers far exceeded expectations. For the first time in his 27 years at the university, Lawrence “made its class” (meaning it had its goal for deposits) based on the mail that had arrived by April 30. At this point, the university has 445 deposits, far more than its target of 370 freshmen. That’s enough so typical “summer melt” — when some students get in off of others’ waiting lists — of 20 or so will still leave the college ahead of its plans. Illinois Wesleyan University is another institution that entered this admission cycle vowing that it would not get in bidding wars — and that it would not let its 42% discount rate grow. Like that of Lawrence, the maximum merit aid it will offer is $15,000. Given that the university’s “overlap” colleges (those with many commonly admitted applicants) include public institutions such as the Universities of Illinois and Iowa and Illinois State University, that means that for most students who don’t qualify for need-based aid, Illinois Wesleyan can only get to being moderately more expensive than the competition, and can’t match. Tony Bankston, dean of admissions, said that the college’s approach this year — in radical contrast to when he started in admissions 18 years ago — was to be upfront about cost, but to shift the conversation. It’s no longer about saying, “We’ll be just as competitive on cost as your other choices,” he said. Rather, the line now is “You will most likely pay more to come here, but here is why we think the investment is worth it.” He said that the university has stressed personal attention, graduation rates, its spending by on undergraduate instruction, and other measures of “value” as opposed to cost. Currently, Illinois Wesleyan is not only running ahead on deposits compared to this time last year (by 18%), but has managed with this approach to attract more minority students and more men. Last year’s entering class was nearly 60% female — a gap typical of many liberal arts colleges these days, but one that worries them. This year, the deposits are setting up a class that would be 53% female. Bankston said that he thinks the idea of getting away from bidding wars is a sound one and that many families are open to such discussions. “Most families just don’t know how the money works in higher education, that a huge scholarship on the front end may very likely detract from the quality of education they receive on the back end,” he said. Colleges should be ready to say that “how a big discount [a student receives] may not be the soundest reason to select a particular college.” Of course, college officials said privately that while they believe in that philosophy, they might be quick to add aid if they had an off year. That’s what happened at Yeshiva University last year, when the freshman class size was 14% smaller than the previous year, following repeated years of growth. Surveys suggested that many of those who didn’t enroll cited financial issues. The trustees then provided an extra $3 million and the university moved up the timing on when financial aid awards went out to early March — a month earlier than normal. Yield and class size are expected to be back to normal.