On average, today’s college students received their first smartphone before their 12th birthday. These “digital natives” expect to be able to navigate every aspect of campus life using their smartphones — and if they can’t do something from their phone, they simply won’t bother.

That presents a challenge for many college campuses, which haven’t always been on the leading edge of technology — illustrated by the fact only 5% of college budgets are dedicated to IT spending. Many academic institutions assume creating a mobile-first experience for incoming students will be complex and costly, but with the right technology and approach, it is possible.

Mobile-first

The global pandemic proved colleges are capable of rapid and effective adoption of new technological platforms, as many of them were forced to move the entire educational experience online in a very short period of time.

Something similar can be achieved when it comes to a mobile-first approach to campus life. Taking a phased approach to manage cost and utilizing digital platforms like Near Field Communication (NFC), can ease the transition to give students access to essential campus systems via their smartphones.

For example, the 360u App from TouchNet, a payments and ID management solutions provider owned by Global Payments, combines secure building access functions, class registration and attendance, and student financial services into a single sign-on app on students’ Apple or Android phones. Student IDs can be added to digital wallets, allowing them to simply tap their phone any time they would traditionally produce a physical ID.

The platform is flexible; students without access to a mobile device can be issued plastic cards with embedded NFT chips if necessary. Best of all, the platform works with a wide variety of existing door access and digital payment hardware, making the investment required to make a campus mobile-first much more attainable.

A mobile-first college campus isn’t the future — today’s college students expect it. The time to give it to them is now. Are you ready to go mobile?

See all 360u has to offer at touchnet.com/id-management/360u-app

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BetterHelp, the world’s largest online therapy platform, offers access to licensed, trained, experienced and accredited mental health professionals including psychologists, marriage and family therapists, clinical social workers, and board-licensed professional counselors.

The telehealth platform’s goal is to change the way people get help dealing with challenges in life. That starts by making professional therapy available to those who need it — anytime, anywhere via computer, smartphone, or tablet.

BetterHelp has therapists who specialize in depression, addiction, anxiety, relationships, stress, trauma, LGBTQ+ matters, grief, and more. Consumers can get weekly live therapy in three ways, including chatting live, speaking over the phone, or video conferencing. You also get unlimited messaging with your therapist outside of weekly live therapy sessions. Other features include access to group webinars led by licensed mental health professionals, journaling tools, worksheets and more.

Recently, BetterHelp achieved a huge milestone: Over 3 million people have used the platform to connect with a licensed therapist online. 

Access to therapy

Therapy can be out of reach for many simply because they can’t afford it. Another challenge is that patients often wait weeks for an in-person appointment, or are concerned about transportation or other logistics. Others worry about privacy.

But BetterHelp closes those gaps. The platform is more affordable than traditional therapy, costing $60-$90 per week; getting started with a therapist can happen within a few hours or days of signing up; and appointments are convenient since they’re virtual and set by the patient.

A patient’s privacy and confidentiality are protected, and users can pick a nickname to identify themselves in the system. Their contact information will only be used for emergencies and everything a patient tells their therapist is confidential.

The membership can be canceled at any time for any reason. The platform doesn’t work with insurance and the provider isn’t able to prescribe medicine or provide clinical diagnoses.

Looking to the future

BetterHelp is supporting the next generation of therapists by investing in the future of mental healthcare providers. That starts with funding “Future of Mental Health Scholarships” — $10,000 academic scholarships to 10 college students majoring in psychology or a mental health-related field during the 2022-23 school year.

“Young people have done tremendous work to reduce the stigma of mental healthcare and advocate for better resources,” said Alon Matas, president and founder of BetterHelp. “We’re excited to launch this first-time scholarship and support future leaders who will no doubt make a huge impact in the mental health space as they build their careers.”

Supporting teachers and students

Many young people are experiencing mental health challenges coming out of the pandemic, including social anxiety, uncertainty, and readjustment concerns.

“We’re looking to help individuals combat those hardships by providing easily accessible mental health services,” said Ciara Kelly, associate program manager of impact, advocacy, and research for BetterHelp.

The virtual mental health platform recently started working with 826LA — a nonprofit that’s dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with creative writing skills, and helping teachers inspire students to write — by offering three months of free therapy to 826LA students and teachers.

Brighter days

BetterHelp is partnering with A Brighter Day, a non-profit focused on helping teens manage stress and depression. The platform is also offering free therapy services to teens experiencing financial difficulties.

Ready to try BetterHelp? USA Today readers get 25% off with code ‘usatoday’. Get started at www.betterhelp.com/usatoday .

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Meningococcal meningitis (a deadly swelling of the membranes protecting the brain and spinal cord) is mainly caused by five types of meningococcal bacteria, referred to as A, B, C, W, and Y. Two separate meningitis vaccines are necessary to be fully immunized against the disease, but most children are only vaccinated against the ACWY forms of bacterial meningitis and not against meningitis B. In fact, only 31% of 17-year-olds in the United States received the MenB vaccine in 2021.

Often, the meningitis B vaccine is not required by schools and colleges because of the disease’s relatively low rate of incidence. However, college students are five times as likely as the general population to contract this disease and 100% of meningitis outbreaks on college campuses since 2011 are because of Meningitis B. In short, not requiring this vaccine can have deadly consequences.

Alicia Stillman and Patti Wukovits both lost their teenage daughters to the disease, which can manifest with flu-like symptoms that worsen with shocking speed — it can kill an otherwise healthy person within 24 hours.

At the time, the MenB vaccine was not available in the United States to help protect their daughters.

“I thought my daughter was fully protected against meningitis because she had received the MenACWY vaccine,” Wukovits said. “I was shocked to learn that she was not.” 

Emily & Kimberly

Emily Stillman was a sophomore in college in 2013.

“Emily always made me and everyone else around her laugh,” Alicia Stillman recalled. “She was warm, charismatic, and loved spending time with her family and friends.”

On Jan. 31, 2013, Emily complained about a headache. No one even suspected meningitis. Alicia thought it might be the flu, while Emily blamed an all-night studying session and lack of sleep. When her headache worsened, Emily walked to the hospital with her schoolwork, but her symptoms got worse and worse. By the time her family arrived, she was unconscious, and just 36 hours later, she had died.

Kimberly Coffey was a 17-year-old high school senior who dreamed of becoming a pediatric nurse.

“She loved to sing, dance, and perform in school musicals,” Wukovits said. “Her greatest joy was a sunny day at the beach.”

Kimberly came home one day complaining of body aches and a 101-degree fever. Wukovits contacted their doctor, who advised her to bring Kimberly in for an examination if her symptoms weren’t improved by the morning.

Less than a day later, she was in the emergency room, suffering from intense pain and a purple rash all over her body. Within hours of arriving at the hospital, her organs were failing. She was laid to rest just three days before she was supposed to graduate high school.

Raising awareness

It’s likely that both Emily and Kimberly would be alive today if they had been vaccinated against meningitis B. Stillman and Wukovits founded the Meningitis B Action Project in order to educate parents and students about the disease and the need for two types of meningitis vaccines to help protect against the most common types of bacterial meningitis in young adults.

The speed with which meningitis can advance from initial symptoms to fatality means that it’s very difficult to treat after the fact, making immunization the main line of defense against the disease.

The two women hope they can spare other families the pain they’ve experienced.

“By educating both parents and students on meningitis B, its symptoms, and the vaccine to help stop it,” Stillman said, “we have the ability to save other young people from this deadly but preventable disease.”

For educational resources and to learn more about meningitis B, visit meningitisbactionproject.org.

The post Closing the Deadly Meningitis B Gap appeared first on Education and Career News.

Michael D. Moss

President, Society for College and University Planning (SCUP)

Meghan Fay Zahniser

Executive Director, Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE)

The term “sustainability” has its most known roots in the 1987 Brundtland Report, which officially defined sustainable development for the first time: “Development which meets the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

The intention of this definition aligns perfectly with the mission of higher education. Colleges and universities are hubs of creativity and innovation, where societal solutions are discussed, challenged, researched, and tested with students who are increasingly seeking institutions that are leading on sustainability in the classroom and beyond. 

Higher education influences every sector of our society — from policy and research to production and manufacturing. Developing sustainability and climate change literacy will help empower students and the public to participate effectively in civic dialogue, which is increasingly focused on the management of sustainability challenges. 

So how do we launch this rapid transformation? Higher education can once again lead this critical moment with administrators and faculty working together within an integrated planning approach. Aligned with the academic mission of our institutions, and embedded into our strategic planning, all stakeholders of the academy and the community will need to come together, just as we did when the pandemic challenged us to keep education viable. We do it at all levels of leadership, together with our students and our communities, and we do it with an aligned sense of purpose to address climate change effectively and urgently.

AASHE and SCUP strongly advocate that higher education administrators, at all levels, have the responsibility to integrate sustainability and climate change needs into every aspect of higher education: strategic plans, department plans, curriculum, research, operations, and community partnerships. The power of our synergy can lead to unexpected ways to work together to address a warming climate, and can prepare students to champion strategies that mitigate climate change in whatever field they choose to pursue. Our organizations and members stand ready to assist higher education in this critical transformation.

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Specialized expertise and established processes are vital for feeding our campus community. Dining services are far more complex these days with retail dining operations, residential dining halls, and catering. Students seek convenience, and that means technology for mobile ordering, delivery, and payment options. Large, medium, or small campus, we all have a lot on our plates and a partner managing all those tasks reduces redundancies and saves the team time and budget.

As a public institution, we at North Carolina A&T answer to many. We are responsible for delivering excellence to our students and budgetary performance to the state. And parents want to know their students are healthy, engaged and thriving every day, beyond the shine of the campus tour. Through a long-term partnership with Sodexo, we have fostered trust that comes with performance, transparency, and accountability. We have shared expectations for quality, customer service, and overall performance. When our partner delivers, our sense of collaboration, transparency, and loyalty grows.

Our dining services partnership also provides deep people operations, expertise, and management. Our dining services team members benefit from exceptional training, recruitment, and promotion opportunities, and are most definitely part of the NC A&T community. They know and are loved by our students and faculty. I have seen particularly how outsourcing our dining services program has helped us better navigate both labor and supply chain challenges during the pandemic.

Finally, outsourcing dining services at NC A&T results in a program that stays fresh. Our students want real value, but they also want cuisines from across the globe, more plant-based and sustainable options, and retail choices that match their favorite hometown restaurants. It’s a tall order, but having a partner who is an expert, and lives and breathes this industry, just as we live and breathe higher education, helps us take full advantage to leverage their supplier network, regional and national innovation team and network of chefs, and their deep consumer research and insights to stay ahead of what students need and want.

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Amy Diehl, Ph.D

Chief Information Officer, Wilson College

How do you currently and hope to shape the future of higher education?

I have worked almost my entire current in higher education technology and I have seen great change in the past couple decades. The internet was new when I started and I’ve watched it transform from basic tools to send messages and look up websites to tools that allow anyone anywhere to gain an education, research, and teach. Higher education is no longer place-bound, and that’s thanks to the Internet and all the related technologies. My IT career has allowed me to play a central role in facilitating the technology transformation in the institutions where I have served.

What current problems do you see within the higher education sphere?

Being able to evolve quickly enough to keep up with workforce demands. There should be incentives for piloting new initiatives — be that a new technology platform, a new program, a new curriculum, a new back-office process, or a new learning modality. Pilot initiatives that succeed should be expanded, while those that don’t succeed should be used as a learning opportunity. Faculty and staff should be rewarded for trying something new and learning from it.

How does technology play a role in both the problems and solutions we see within higher education today?

In today’s world, technology is infused into almost every aspect of higher education. But with the ubiquitousness of technology comes cybersecurity risks. There are many technologies that can help secure systems while maintaining usability. But if I can give one quick tip, it’s this: Turn on multi-factor authentication for everyone in front of every system. Most hacking-related breaches are the result of stolen or weak password. Multi-factor authentication adds another layer of protection from attacks that can cost institutions millions.

The post An Expert’s Take On the Future of Higher Education and Technology appeared first on Education and Career News.

Alicia Stillman

What should university administrators know about future trends of higher education?

Infectious diseases that thrive on the way college students behave are going to continue to be a risk. Administrators have to be proactive in working to prevent such threats to ensure that higher education environments remain as safe as possible for students and the larger community. For example, through our work at the Meningitis B Action Project, we have learned that only a handful of colleges and universities require both the MenACWY and MenB vaccines — which are both needed to protect students against the most common types of bacterial meningitis. Bacterial meningitis is more prevalent among college students so a good first step in addressing this risk factor is to update immunization requirements to require both types of meningitis vaccines, or at the very least make sure students and parents know about the two types of meningitis vaccines.

How can administrators ensure students’ safety and health?

Having lost my daughter to meningitis B — a now-vaccine preventable disease — as a sophomore in college, I believe strongly in the power of vaccines. For many students and parents, college immunization requirements are understood as the only vaccines needed to protect oneself, which is not necessarily true. Comprehensive vaccination requirements are a great way to ensure the health and safety of students and the nearby community.   

What, in your opinion, is the most vital thing for students, teachers, administrators, and parents to tackle during this upcoming school year?

In our opinion, promoting the power and importance of all age-relevant vaccines through a multi-faceted approach is most important as we think about the upcoming school year. Whether it is the seasonal flu vaccine, HPV vaccine, or vaccines to prevent meningitis, we need to make sure parents have the information they need to make a decision for their children and that students feel empowered to take charge of their health through vaccination.

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Universities have been adapting traditional business models for years, but the global pandemic accelerated these trends. A recent survey conducted by Salesforce found that 45 percent of universities are implementing new business models.

Saint Mary’s University in Halifax is an example of a school that had to adapt as a result of the pandemic. “We had to move to a completely online model,” says Darrell Rooney, the school’s senior director of financial services, planning & analysis. “We had no idea how that was going to impact enrollment. But worse than that, we had no way of quantifying what registration looked like until the term started.”

Shifting focus

That lack of clarity meant the university couldn’t predict tuition revenue. “There was always this lag between enrollment data and the financial piece,” explains Tracey MacDonald, director of institutional data analysis and planning at Saint Mary’s. “So, we said, ‘Okay, how do we fix that?’”

Shifting their focus to a course-based revenue model powered by Vena Complete Planning, a business planning platform leveraging a native Excel interface, gave them the necessary insights. “We knew that anything involving students being on campus was going to be impacted,” notes Rooney. “But we didn’t have a sense of where tuition was going to be until we developed a model in Vena to calculate tuition on a weekly basis. We never had that before.”

Vena gave Rooney the ability to build his budget based on course registrations. “We’re able to now track actual course registrations against budget,” he says. “We would have had to calculate everything manually in the past, but now Vena is doing all that.”

Visualizing data

Modern platforms like Vena Complete Planning allow universities to share data more effectively. “I’m creating a data hub,” says MacDonald. “I see it as different visions of presentation versus just ‘access.’ I can give customized access to various departments so they can slice and dice and filter and do their own thing with the data.”

The visualization capabilities provided by Vena’s platform, which includes an integration with Power BI, are a key element to this new approach to data and financial planning and modeling. “It’s amazing how much more easily digestible it is in a visualization, as opposed to the tables I used to put out,” notes MacDonald. “It becomes easier to use in decision-making.”

That ease of use is crucial because there is more data than ever before, including real-time data on enrollment and tuition driving weekly reports. MacDonald uploads a data file into the university’s Vena system on Sunday, and a report goes out on Monday morning. And since they’ve been doing this for more than a year now, they can also analyze year-on-year trends.

Analytics

“One of the things I think universities do is spend a lot of time compiling data — and not a great amount of time analyzing data,” Rooney notes. “What we see when we go to conferences are people looking for reporting solutions, they’re looking for analytical solutions, but there aren’t a great number of them out there.” 

Rooney has set up a financial planning and analysis team at Saint Mary’s, and he sees data analytics as crucial for all universities going forward. “We have a lot of data — a ton of it,” adds MacDonald. “The key is communication, taking all of those pieces and then making sure the right people have that information. Because if no one’s utilizing the data for decision making, then that’s problematic.”

MacDonald believes this change in how universities approach data around finances and enrollment along with tools like Vena will continue to trend. “I do think it’s going to raise the bar. The more data that we show to our stakeholders, the more they want,” she notes.

To learn more about how Vena can aid your planning, visit venasolutions.com.

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Higher education enrollment dropped dramatically in 2020, and fall 2021 rates declined by an additional 3.2 percent, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Now more than ever, education leaders must modernize financial planning and analysis processes to remain viable today and in the future. If you want your institution to truly thrive, you’ll need more dynamic forecasting and scenario analysis capabilities to make informed, data-driven decisions so you can anticipate and respond to whatever the future holds. Consider the following best practices for long-range planning and agility.

Compare forward-looking models to current plans

Financial modeling begins with the current budget or strategic plan. A mix-and-match approach to assumptions allows leaders to examine conservative and aggressive scenarios individually or in conjunction with other scenarios. Assumptions can include revenue increases or decreases, historical actuals, enrollment changes, economic factors, wages, interest rates, capital markets, and much more.

Long-range plans encompass a range of possible future states over several years that reflect assumptions, allowing leaders to understand the potential positive and negative financial impacts of any initiative or series of initiatives. For example, a new program may need significant initial investment and a time horizon of a few years before the investment results in higher enrollment and revenues. Modeling a new scenario should be as easy as changing inputs, running the report, and comparing it side-by-side with previous models in terms of impacts on the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement. If this process involves numerous spreadsheets or more than 10-minutes of work at your institution, you will benefit dramatically from adopting modern technology designed for this purpose.

 Account for all funds in models

Long-range plans should include a full set of financial statements, including a GAAP-based statement of activities, balance sheet, and cash flow statements. Since decisions can affect how ratings agencies view an institution’s creditworthiness, rigor in long-range plans is critical.

The base case scenario should show an institution’s financial outlook for the next 5-10 years, given current trends and including all funds, debt capacity, capital plans, and cash flow. Depending on the initiative, key drivers could include increased wage costs, additional revenues, new or reduced employee benefits, better classroom utilization, or changes in state appropriations.

Scenarios aggregate the various driver inputs to determine changes to the baseline scenario over different time periods. The analysis should include an income statement, balance sheet, cash flow projections, debt capacity, and key ratios. Modern processes make it easy for your team to consider multiple scenarios in tandem, and to change drivers on the fly in response to questions, comments, new information, and other factors.

Measure and monitor KPIs and benchmarks

According to the Syntellis 2021 Higher Education Financial Technology Trends report, only half of colleges and universities currently use financial key performance indicators (KPIs), which lags other uses for KPIs, including enrollment (80 percent) and academic data (73 percent).

Among institutions that track and report financial KPIs, common data points encompass revenue/productivity, credit ratings agency, and administrative or academic cost benchmarks. Many college and university finance teams say they struggle to access reliable data and create reports that non-finance leaders can understand.

When crafting long-range plans to share across the administration, you’ll need to integrate data from source systems — general ledger, student information system, etc. — and combine that with economic, benchmarking, and credit agency data to create a complete financial picture. Sleek charts and graphs make it easy to visually demonstrate performance against benchmarks, so leaders can better understand the impacts of today’s decisions over the next several years.

Improve transparency to support decision-making

Aggregating disparate data on a common platform, accounting for all funds, and including KPIs and benchmarks are critical factors to effective long-range planning. Reporting functionality ties the other elements together to bring transparency and logic to decision-making, helping stakeholders understand changes over longer timespans than the annual budget.

As you adjust processes to accommodate long-range planning, this may necessitate further digital transformation. These considerations require modern tools that can compare scenarios to show the impact of each on cash flow, utilization, debt capacity, or any other metric — a feature that spreadsheets can’t emulate. Look for a long-range planning solution with integrated budgeting and forecasting functionalities — this will ensure efficient, accurate, and secure planning processes.

Robust forecasting and scenario modeling can take much of the guesswork out of long-range planning, leaving more time for finance leaders and governing boards to focus on the strategic business decisions that will position their institutions for continued success both now and over the long term.

To learn more about performance management solutions, visit syntellis.com.

The post Modernize Forecasting and Modeling to Prepare for Higher Education’s Uncertain Future appeared first on Education and Career News.

However, because the modern campus is anywhere there’s a wi-fi signal, your school’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution needs to keep up. Many legacy systems, installed and maintained on-site, can’t handle the security and reliability needs of today’s higher education students, staff, and faculty. 

As many schools around the country and the world have already figured out, the solution is in the cloud, and Ellucian’s suite of campus technologies are designed to make that transition easy, secure, and cost-effective.

Enabling student success

The goal of any thriving higher education institution is to ensure its students succeed. With Ellucian, you can give students the tools to learn, collaborate, and interact with campus materials when, where, and how they want.

“We can provide students with a simple, intuitive purpose-built SaaS solution that enables a modern user experience which establishes their school at the forefront of technology,” said Michael Wulff, chief technology officer for Ellucian. “Students want to have a native app-like experience when they interact with their school’s online platform.”

With Ellucian, you’re able to deliver that modern, unified experience no matter what students are doing across your platform, whether it’s enrolling in classes, adding funds to their residential dining account, or ordering a transcript.

One of the advantages of doing all of those tasks in the cloud is that the platform can scale to anticipate increased traffic, meaning fewer slowdowns during peak usage times, like early action for applicants and enrollment periods for active students.

Managed by experts

Because colleges and universities handle so much sensitive data from students, staff, faculty, and alumni, security is a critical part of any school’s computing platform. While moving your school’s sensitive data away from in-house servers and into the cloud sounds perilous to some, it’s actually a more secure method.

That’s because one of the key advantages of using a SaaS solution like Ellucian is that their expert team of R&D professionals (all of whom are 100 percent focused on higher education) is able to update and improve your platform in real time, keeping it constantly protected against threats. That’s increasingly important as higher education instruction becomes more virtual, which can leave legacy platforms exposed.

Ellucian is perfect for schools looking to make the transition to cloud computing because it easily integrates with third-party apps and existing systems. That means you can move as many or as few applications to the cloud as you like and add on services as you go.

“We can help you transition to the cloud at your own pace to meet your desired goals,” Wulff said.

With solutions for student information systems, human resources, finance, retention, recruiting, analytics, and more, Ellucian gives institutions the space to innovate. Learn more about how Ellucian’s cloud-enabled SaaS technologies can help bring your college or university into the future by visiting ellucian.com.

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