Going through some old (and I mean OLD) files, I came across this
Contract that was created while I was president at Rockland
Community College
(NY). It was resisted by some faculty but we finally gained
enough acceptance to move it through to the Board which jumped on it
and a community shell shocked after a $12.8 million state and federal
financial aid allowance loved it. (No, I didn't create the problem It was my job
to resolve it, keep the college open and fiscally solvent. We did.)
The guarantee created confidence in our academic program and student
focus.It was also the right thing to do. It also gained national
recognition as a forward thinking approach to learning and jobs. Not
sure what happened once I left in a protest over Board impropriety and
ties to a politician who would soon go to jail after I left).
I still think it is a good, student-focused idea that could be adapted
by any college and would go a long way to help the beleaguered reputations of community colleges in particular but also most four-year schools. they are all under f ire now for not having enough success in helping students complete and get jobs.
There are some that say we cannot guarantee ;learning but under this contract we do all we can to assure that learning has taken place. It also causes grades to mean something other than showing up.
Let me know if you think it still has benefits.
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Guaranteed Education is Great Customer Service
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Academician Heal Thyself
Are most colleges businesses and not just the obviously
for-profit ones either? All colleges sell their services (marketing and recruitment),have sales
staff (admissions), bill payable and collections (bursar), service
providers (faculty) administrators and staff. They all do their best to provide
services that their customers (students) want (electives) or must have
(required courses). And they all try to make a profit (fund balance/surplus) or
at least not to lose money of at all possible. They have employees and unions. Pay
salaries and extend benefits And they do produce products (degrees) and sell
services.
Maybe they are businesses; unique businesses but businesses
just the same. Businesses like a medical practice perhaps with professionals
serving the needs of their patients. Each tries to use professional services providers
(doctors/professors) to better the lives of their clients. Each purports to
higher missions than making money. Each make
patients/customers/ students pay for services but each is also paid for some of
the services by outside groups like insurance and the government for medical
practices and local, state and federal government for colleges. Each depends on
a core of contracted professionals; doctors for the medical practice and
faculty for colleges.
But there are also differences. Whereas medical practices
are dedicated to doing all they can to save their customers, colleges seem to
be rather indifferent to their customers’ success and longevity. Medical
practices try to keep their customers alive and coming to the practice while
colleges seem to thrive on having huge swathes of their clientele die off or leave.
If a medical practice had a reputation of losing a third of its patients every year,
it would be seen as questionably competent; a group to stay away from. Many colleges
lose fifty percent of their students with some losing as many as 80% of a class
and they are still enrolling future students. A medical practice with such a
bad record would get cut off from government funds and close while colleges
with terrible retention records often get grants to try and keep them going and
failing.
Colleges have a rather strange relationship with their customers.
And while we are at it, they are customers. Students exchange money for goods
and services and that makes them customers by definition. Call them students
if that makes it easier to swallow, call them the college’s clients if that
makes one feel better but they are customers.
Colleges spend an inordinate amount of time and money to
attract their customers to get them to
buy the college’s offerings, but then do so very little to retain them. They spend
around $5460 to obtain every new customer and process him or her into the
system but then neglect to capitalize on that investment by ignoring their needs
and expectations. As a result, large percentages of their customer base leave
the college each semester.
They exert a great deal of energy trying to get potential
students to believe that the college cares about them but as soon as the
student signs the application check and deposit, they just toss them into the
deep end of the college and do all they can to make them sink. They treat all
students with the same services as if they all were the same and too often we have
found those services are lacking in quality and assistance. In fact, if one
looks at how much money a college actually spends in student services needed to
retain their customers, it would be shockingly low f there is any money set
aside for retention services at all..
What should be the primary activity of college –educating
its students – treats all students as if they were the same learner. The
lecture approach for example just sends out information as if all the students learn
the same way. Everyone is given the same information and work whether or not
his personal needs and learning protocols are receptive to them. This is certainly different than medicine in
which every treatment is personalized to the particular patient. College hands
out information as if every patient needed the same medicine whether or not the
need exists for that medicine. If a doctor gave out the same prescription to
all he or she would be seen as incompetent. Colleges are seen as efficient when
the same lecture is given to a class of 500 in an introductory course independent
of whether learning actually takes place.
But doctors work with fewer patients than does a professor lecturing
to a class of one or two hundred even as few as 50. Doctors who work a
clinic may easily see that many patients in a week and they all get some personal
attention. The average professor has three classes of 20 or 60 students total so
what is the excuse of not giving each student personal attention to make sure
they all succeed?
When a patient needs extra care, he is often sent to see a professional
specialist. In college that might happen in writing when a student is sent to a
writing lab but in other areas the student with extra need is often handed off
to a peer tutor. And we wonder why students
with extra need fail so then. It is as if we have a patient with a serious
problem being sent to a med student for specialized help. Why is that? Because
the professor is considered too busy to deal with tutoring in most schools. And
the more senior the professor and more renowned in her knowledge the less time
she has for the primary purpose of college, making sure students succeed and
graduate in many too many cases.
When one boils it down, a major difference between a medical
practice and a college is that in the practice each patient is individually important
whereas in a college, a student is not. To “lose a patent” in a medical practice
is considered a terrible thing. In college losing a student can just be sign
that the college is academically rigorous. In the medical practice, when a
patient is lost that often calls for a review of why that patient is gone. In
most colleges if a student leaves, no one looks into why he or she left. It
just is not that important. “We’ll go and recruit another”. A life may be damaged
when a student leaves or flunks out but that is not of much concern to the
college. A student life is just not that important.
In a medical practice, the administrators worry about patients
who will sue for one reason or other. In college, administrators worry about
faculty members complaining about one thing or another. As a result, medical
practices do all they can to treat the patient’s ills and personal needs while
colleges treat the needs and self-perceived injuries of the faculty more than
the students.
Colleges need to become more like medical practices,
businesses that focus on the needs of their patients, the customers first and
foremost. They need to rethink their priorities and put students first and the
services they need to each succeed focus upon what each student needs to
succeed. Colleges need to put the student first and provide all the services
they need to succeed.
IF THIS ARTICLE MAKES SENSE TO YOU
GET A COPY OF FROM ADMISSIONS TO GRADUATION: INCREASING SUCCESS THROUGH ACADEMIC CUSTOMER SERVICE
BY DR. NEAL A. RAISMAN NOW BY CLICKING HERE
BY DR. NEAL A. RAISMAN NOW BY CLICKING HERE
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Colleges Need to be More Like Hospitals
Hospitals are like colleges. They have an administration
that is not trusted by the hospital community. Doctors who have a somewhat independent
relationship to the hospital, being able to do as they please for the most part
with their patients. Their allegiance is to their discipline more than to the
hospital. Hospitals also have indifferent
staffs as well as some stellar performers And hospitals have patients sort of
like colleges have students.
A major difference though is that in the hospital, people
show great concern for the patients and try to save each one while colleges
accept a student “death rate” around 50%, the national attrition rate. That is
a significant difference.
In the hospital treatment is centered around the immediate
and personal needs of the patient while in colleges the students’ needs are
often neglected. In hospitals if a patient needs help, she or she can get that
assistance from a qualified professional. In a college if s student needs extra
help they get to work with a peer tutor. How many of you would be comfortable
with another patient taking care of you in the hospital?
In the hospital, each patient gets care that is appropriate
for him or her needs. In college everyone is treated the same too often in classrooms
where the professor just drones out with the same information and teaching for
everyone whether they get the material or
not.
Another difference is that the hospitals try to admit people
who can benefit from the treatment they provide. If a person is not a good candidate
for hospital care, he or she does not get in while at many, too many schools,
they let in anyone whether or not they can benefit from the stay at the
college.
Hospitals also try to save every one of the patients they
have. If a patient is “crashing” they have a team that comes quickly to triage
the patient and try to keep them alive. While if a student is crashing at most
schools, the college lets him or another flunk. It is seldom that the professor
(the doctor) will commit himself to triage the student and do all he can to save
that student in the class. Hospitals even have a special ward for patients who are
in the gravest chance of dying. It is the ICU while in schools may not even let
a student know if he or she is in danger of failing a course or flunking out.
Oddly enough hospitals that lose too many patients are
looked down upon while schools that “cull out” large numbers of students are considered to have
high standards. Hospitals that save patients are considered tops in their areas while
schools that do all they can to save students are… Well, they are rare.
We need to act more like hospitals and care about each and
every student we admit. Every one of them needs to be saved and kept healthy.
It is not enough to admit them. We must provide all the professional services
and care they need to succeed or like hospitals, we will be scrutinized even
further and many will not survive that.
There is a lot we can learn from hospitals especially the clear
focus on each and every patient. They know it is not enough to admit a patient.
They have to do all they can to save them too. They also know something that we
have not really learned. It takes a great deal of information and data to properly
care for a patient/student.
Every test and exam is posted for all doctors to see and in
many cases now for the patients to also see, For example, I go to the Ohio State
University hospital system for my medical care. Every time I have a blood test,
every result is posted on a system they call My Chart. It tells me the result;
whether or not that is normal or not and what each test means, I am fully
informed. If I have an appointment coming up or need to schedule one, the
system sends me an email letting me know. It is in contact with me at all
times.
And I can use it to contact my doctors to get more details
or help. All I need to do is scroll down and enter an email to a doctor and he
or she gets it. And, they respond. Moreover, when I went to the Cleveland
Clinic it was able to pull up my entire chart on-line and see all my doctors’
notes and exam results. It was fully informed on me as a patient. It had my
record so transfer into their system was simple. I did not have to repeat tests
at all.
Schools need to build or obtain systems like this to allow
students full access to their records and notes. They need a system as
hospitals have to notify him when he needs to do something now to stay healthy.
This is a customer service which is needed now to save more students. And in
turn, keep more schools from having to shut down or consolidate services as hospitals
did in the 80’s
IF THIS ARTICLE MAKES SENSE TO YOU GET A COPY OF FROM ADMISSIONS TO GRADUATION; INCREASING SUCCESS THROUGH ACADEMIC CUSTOMER SERVICE
by Dr. Neal Raisman, author of the best selling book The Power of Retention.
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