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Leveraging Existing Areas of Innovation

 For a couple of decades, the Honors Program languished as an underfunded afterthought to Northwestern’s academic mission, despite the yeoman work of several past faculty directors. In Spring 2016, this changed when the faculty unanimously passed a major overhaul to the honors curriculum.  Among the numerous changes, two aspects of this overhaul were significant:  […]
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Curricular Malleability

 Not all aspects of higher education are inherently flexible.  Accrediting bodies place stringent demands on certain departments; proposals for new or modified majors require a rationale, an assessment plan, and supporting documents—including syllabi for courses that may not yet exist; college-wide programs, such as NWCore, may require a faculty vote before changes can be made; […]
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Problem and Experience Based Learning

 It was less than 25 years ago that the shift in emphasis from teaching to learning was dubbed “a new paradigm” for higher education by Barr and Tagg in Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning.  Yet the paradigm shift did not merely codify a new normal.  Instead, learning-centered models have served as fertile ground in the development […]
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Core Structure

 Today’s young people will have ‘episodic careers,’rather than one life-long career. Post-graduation, young people will have an estimated four jobs before they even turn 32, often switching into “entirely different industries”, according to a LinkedIn study. Indranil Roy, the head of the Deloitte-backed Future of Work Centre of Excellence, says,“A generation ago, the half-life of a […]
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Offer undergraduate certificates

From CIC report (p. 57): “Augustana College introduced a certificate program in nonprofit leadership development to help prepare liberal arts majors for leadership roles with nonprofit organizations. The program was developed in response to student interest and in alignment with the college’s mission and values. It provides students with formal documentation of their competence in the areas of communication, business, accounting, and ethics.”
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Humanities Internships

Higher education institutions that emphasize internships for humanities graduates do so with good reason. Employer perceptions and opinions suggest that internships have become almost obligatory for students and graduates seeking employment, as indicated by a recent Chronicle of Higher Education survey (Figure 1.6, on the following page). The survey findings suggest that “an internship is the single most important credential for recent college graduates to have on their resume in their job search among all industry segments.” (p. 12)