• From the Director: Spring 2011
• Alumni Volunteer Opportunities in Admissions
• What We Are Reading

From The Director: Spring 2011

I would like to send a special thank you to the “working group” of alumni who have dedicated themselves this past year to getting the Alumni Advisory Board up and running:  Joel Seligman (Cohort 7) – our chair, together with Ted Richardson (Cohort 4); Jim Garvey (Cohort 5); Janet Lindner, Paul Marthers, Mark Reed, and Sue Wasiolek (Cohort 6); and Dennis Clark, Dena Haritos Tsamitis, and Roger Ward (Cohort 7).  The group dedicated themselves to starting something from scratch with the goal of enhancing the intellectual and professional community among our alumni.  I personally appreciate what we’ve started here, and my colleagues in the Higher Education Division are quite proud of boasting that we have the strongest alumni group at PennGSE. 

Our alumni efforts continue with another announcement about a terrific accomplishment:  our graduating class, Cohort 9, instituted the first Exec Doc Class Gift under the leadership of Doug Clark and Damon Cates – and achieve 100% participation from the cohort.  In the midst of the class campaign, news came from South Africa that the Kliptown youth non-profit which has hosted the Exec Doc study abroad for many years had a devastating fire.  The class then decided to designate a portion of their fund for rebuilding the youth center.  The remaining class gift is now in a special-purpose fund, and we are working with the Alumni Advisory Board to identify appropriate uses for the gift (and future gifts) that will promote the mission of Exec Doc. 

In faculty news, you may be interested to learn that Marybeth Gasman has been promoted to the rank of full Professor, and Shaun Harper was promoted to Associate Professor and granted tenure.  As well, Matt Hartley was recently named the first-ever Moorman-Simon Faculty Fellow at the Netter Center for Community Partnerships at Penn.  Congratulations to all three of our colleagues on these important milestones and recognitions! 

Finally, as alumni you may be interested to hear a little feedback from a Executive Search Forum I hosted in January.  The forum brought together search consultants from several big (including Julie Filizetti, Cohort 1, who is a search consultant in the San Francisco office of Isaacson Miller) together with some of Exec Doc’s chief competitor programs to discuss how our programs are viewed in the search world and how our alumni compete with the Exec Doc experience.  It was an illuminating conversation, and a key take away is that our competitors (places like Harvard, Vanderbilt, and George Washington Universities), have ceded the upper end of the market to Exec Doc:  they regularly refer prospective students to us if they are at advanced stages of their careers, and the search firms recognize our program as a critical experience in preparing candidates for more senior level appointments.  We will continue our outreach to the executive search community and find innovative ways to advance the reputation of your degrees with this important constituency.  

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Alumni Volunteer Opportunities in Admissions

Ambassador

In 2009 we launched our Alumni Ambassador program for new recruits and new students. The program draws from a list of Exec Doc alumni who have volunteered their contact information so that we can connect them with prospective students who want to learn more about the program. We match prospective students with ambassadors with the intent of the pairing having some connection based on location, background, field, or institution. We value your time as alumni and want to ensure your volunteer efforts are utilized in the best way – toward that end, we are interested in hearing feedback on our program and on other ambassador/mentor strategies that exist. Please reach out to Laura Foltman at foltman@gse.upenn.edu or 215.746.6401 to discuss further.

Alumni Testimonials for Marketing

You can be the poster child of Exec Doc! It is time once again for a refresh of our marketing materials. In addition to new pictures, updated copy, etc., Exec Doc is looking for quotes from alumni to put in the catalog and on the website. The best quotes are relatively short (one or two sentences), and encapsulate reflections on the experience of the program itself or where the degree subsequently took you. If you are interested in having your quote/reflections featured in the catalog please email Laura Foltman at foltman@gse.upenn.edu with your thoughts (and, if selected, we’ll want a picture of you as well). You could send in a pithy quote, or you could write a longer reflective statement and let us select a portion that might fit in with a message we are attempting to convey to prospective students. Below are some questions to get you thinking:

• Regarding the logistics of the program, what were your favorite aspects, and how did the structure facilitate the completion of your degree in such a short time?

• Why did you choose Penn over other programs?

• What aspects of the program had the greatest impact in the 1st year or 2nd years as an alumnus/a of the program?

• What was your goal participating in Exec Doc?  And did the program move you toward that goal?

• How has the program helped you in your career?

• What are your reflections on the faculty, teaching, and the dissertation?

• How has the cohort and the alumni network continued to add to your professional (or personal) development?

Conferences

After several successful admission cycles, we are adjusting our recruitment efforst to put a greater emphasis on connecting to prospective students at major national conferences rather than the small-yield information sessions we typically have had.  This strategy has the added advantage of connecting our alumni who are active in these associations.  We will still be holding a a number of in-person and virtual information sessions, and love it when our alumni attend when we’re in your area.  The conference-focused strategy will require a two-pronged approach:  first, program faculty and staff will host receptions at some conferences (as we have done at NACUBO and NASPA in the past), and at others we will ask alumni and current students to help host.  Expect more details to follow as we identify the conference calendar for the coming year.  In the meantime, please send Laura Foltman, foltman@gse.upenn.edu a list of higher education conferences (national, regional, and other meetings) at which you feel Exec Doc should have a presence – we welcome your suggestions of where to find the top talent in higher education leadership.

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What We Are Reading

Trends in College Spending 1998-2008

July 2010, The Delta Cost Project

Jane Wellman, Executive Director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Costs, Productivity, and Accountability, was the keynote speaker of the 2011 Exec Doc Alumni Conference in January and also initiated a new module on Managing College Costs for students in Cohort 10.  The module, co-taught by her colleague at the Delta Cost Project and former college chief financial officer Rick Staisloff,  is an attempt to further the classroom discussion of higher education’s major fiscal challenges.

 Jane asked the students to read the latest report from the Delta Cost Project, - a national trends report and cost-comparison tool released in July 2010 to provide insight into how thousands of the nation’s colleges and universities are spending their resources, with implications for what that means for “the new normal” in college spending.  The report – Trends in College Spending 1998-2008: Where Does the Money Come From? Where Does It Go? What Does It Buy? – examines national college spending and resource trends in the years leading up to the current recession. Focusing on the period from 1998 to 2008 (the most recent year for which data are available), the report highlights several ongoing patterns in how institutions get and spend their money. TCS Online (www.tcs-online.org), a new web-based application of the Delta project database, complements the national trends report with easy access to institution and state-level details.

Major Findings in the “Trends” Report

• Sharp increases in spending between 1998 and 2003 by a handful of colleges and universities, creating competitive pressures on spending everywhere.

• Regular cycles in funding for both public and private non-profit institutions: up in good times, down in bad. The one constant is growing dependence on tuition revenues, now the most stable and predictable source of revenues in higher education.

• The share of spending going to pay for instruction has consistently declined when revenues decline, relative to growth in spending in academic and student support and administration. This erosion persists even when revenues rebound, meaning that over time there has been a gradual shift of resources away from instruction and towards general administrative and academic infrastructure.

• Except for private research universities, tuitions are not increasing because spending is going up. They are going up because of cost-shifting—meaning that instead of cutting spending in the face of revenue declines, institutions consistently shift to higher tuitions.

• There are wide variations between states in the ways they invest in higher education. A few states have actually increased spending for higher education over this decade, although many did not. There has also been a slight shift in state subsidy patterns, away from public research universities and toward masters’ and community colleges.

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