MATC Matters

If you haven’t been keeping up with MATC’s Environmental Scan blog, here’s a glimpse of what’s news this week:

ACT Report: 75% of College Prep Students Not Prepared for College;
The college testing organization reports that only one in four who complete their core curriculum in high school is ready for college-level work.

Maximizing Your Return on People
During a recent focus session that involved more than 800 full and part-time faculty, support staff and administrators the category that “mattered most� was helping students to be successful. What was also clear from the work done during that focus session is that MATC needs to put more into our most valuable resource for continuing and improving on student success – our employees. In the March 2007 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Laurie Bassi and Daniel McMurrer published an article entitled “Maximizing Your Return on People�. They lay out the human capital drivers and have a tool for assessing institutional effectiveness so organizational performance can be improved.

Radical Transparency Anyone?:
Pretend for a second that you’re a CEO. Would you reveal your deepest, darkest secrets online? That’s exactly what Glenn Kelman did. And he thinks it saved his business.

Massive IT breaches at Ohio U blamed on institutional divides:
Last week, a student newspaper alleged that data security failures at the University of Ohio sprung from a schism that split management of the college’s computer and network staff.

New Urbanism Infiltrates Rural Colleges: Why are some rural colleges building condos & retirement communities on campus? It’s all about attracting aging boomers with the allure of urban amenities.

Environmental Scan is the news blog from MATC’s Institutional Research & Effectiveness Dept. Written by MATC employees, our mission is to keep you udpated on the latest trends and challenges in higher education.

Thanks to inspiration from Tech Academy and Digg.com, we’ve made further improvements to our blog, so that posting stories is fast, easy & fun! Here’s how the Scan works: If you see an interesting article on the web regarding academia, we post the article to our blog. From there, you can comment on the ideas presented in the articles. If you’re interested in contributing to the blog, please contact Dan McCormick at djmccormick@matcmadison.edu or 246-6412.

New stories will be posted every week, so be sure to bookmark our site: www.environmentalscan.org.