Governance for Student Success

With generous support from Lumina Foundation for Education, AGB has set out on a two-year project--Governance for Student Success--that emphasizes the role of governing boards working in collaboration with institutional presidents to help achieve the nation's educational needs.  The project focuses on three important components for success in higher education: leadership, productivity, and quality.

Quality: Board fiduciary responsibility applies not only to finances, but also to assuring that students receive a high quality education that is aligned with institutional mission. The project work on boards and educational quality will entail assisting boards to work with their chief executives and the institutions' academic leaders to better understand their responsibilities for academic quality, including student learning assessment.  The aim is to reshape institutional dialogues about educational quality by providing avenues for boards to enter the conversation and engage in purposeful oversight of the academic enterprise.  Efforts include a survey about information governing boards receive on institutional assessment of undergraduate student learning and academic quality, and how boards use this information in fulfilling their fiduciary responsibilities.  The report, "How Boards Oversee Educational Quality," is available here. Based on this work, the AGB Board issued a Statement on Board Engagement in Overseeing Educational Quality.

Leadership: The first part of the project will focus on how boards, in concert with presidents, lead change. This research will examine boards which operate at a high level of strategic engagement.  Transforming institutions will require boards capable of transforming their own work, moving well beyond those that, at the end of the day, remain only "good enough." This work will result in a publication capturing key characteristics of high performing boards, describing the board's role in institutional change, and advice on institutional transformation. 

Productivity: The second part of the project involves working with boards and chief executives to generate and reinvest savings. Strategic Finance is a forward-looking and efficient approach premised on institutional mission and strategic planning. By monitoring and controlling costs, strategic finance results in greater institutional ability to manage finances in a time of reduced state support, reduced earnings from endowments, and higher demand for enrollment, service, and public accountability. Through half- and full-day workshops AGB will work with institutional or system boards and CEOs to better understand strategic finance and develop an action plan.  Grant monies will cover the consultant's fee and AGB's administrative work, costing institutions and systems only travel-related expenses. For more information on Strategic Finance or to schedule a workshop click here.

Staff

The project is led by Ellen-Earle Chaffee, a senior fellow in AGB's Center for Public Trusteeship and Governance.  Dr. Chaffee is former president of Valley City State University and Mayville State University in North Dakota, and former chief academic officer of the North Dakota University System. She is also the former president of the Association for Institutional Research and the Association for the Study of Higher Education.

About Lumina

Lumina Foundation for Education, an Indianapolis-based private foundation, strives to help people achieve their potential by expanding access to and success in education beyond high school.  Through grants for research, innovation, communication and evaluation, as well as policy education and leadership development, Lumina Foundation addresses issues that affect access and educational attainment among all students, especially underserved student groups such as minorities, students from low-income families, first-time college-goers and working adults.  The Foundation believes postsecondary education is one of the most beneficial investments individuals can make in themselves and that a society can make in its people.