Page 185 - Crisis in Higher Education

156 • Crisis in Higher Education

2. Building new dormitories must be carefully examined given the
trend toward distance learning, and outsourcing the ownership,
construction, and operation of dormitories must be considered.
3. Universities that make students a priority should not require them
to live on campus.
4. Universities must examine future trends in higher education to
determine how changes in the pedagogy, size of administration,
and other factors impact the need to build new facilities.
5. After this careful examination, if universities need more buildings,
they must find ways to design and build them to be functional,
attractive, and cost less.
6. Student fees must be spent for nonacademic purposes and paying
fees is at the option of the students. Funds for academic purposes
and nonacademic purposes must not be comingled.
7. Students deserve fast and easy access to services. It is important to
use technology, lean thinking, and value stream mapping to design
and implement new and innovative processes.
8. Every student must have a plan of study that identifies which courses
to take and when they should take them to graduate in the shortest
possible time.
9. Universities must diversify their pedagogy to cope with the vari-
ous learning styles of students. Efforts to do so should enhance
learning, reduce costs, and change the roles and responsibilities of
faculty. Universities must invest in the upfront cost to create this
new pedagogy.
10. The process for students to evaluate faculty must change so instruc-
tional faculty are under less pressure to reduce course content and
lower learning standards.
a. Take instructional faculty out of the line of fire by making ten-
ured and professional faculty responsible for course content,
test creation, and grading.
b. Assess teaching effectiveness of contractual faculty and tenured
faculty by evaluating them based on what students learned in
their courses, using pretesting and posttesting.
c. Student evaluations assess the (1) availability and use of
learning tools to help students learn faster and easier and
(2) performance of faculty, which emphasize how students
were treated.