Cross-college collaboration — from insidehighered.com by Megan Rogers
Excerpt:
Faced with increasingly tight budgets, liberal arts colleges are looking to share resources to reduce costs and expand programs. But when the end goal is collaboration and not a merger, how should administrators decide which services are appropriate to share?
St. Olaf and Carleton Colleges, both liberal arts colleges in Northfield, Minn., have received a $1.4 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to increase collaboration over the next four years, but are drawing the line at sharing career services departments. And it’s hard to imagine the colleges collaborating in areas where they are competitors, such as fund-raising or admissions, St. Olaf President David Anderson said.
From DSC:
In order to survive within higher ed — and if things migrate to more of a team-based approach to content creation and delivery — I’ve often wondered if the following will occur:
- The necessity of sharing/pooling resources — especially those involving the creation and delivery of courses (i.e. one college contributes X courses, another contributes Y courses)
- The requirement to form partnerships for most institutions of higher education (vendors, especially), as the unbundling of higher education continues
- The need to form consortia