Green, K. C., & Jaschik, S., Lederman, D. The 2012 Inside Higher Ed survey of college & university presidents. Inside Higher Ed, Washington, DC, 2012. Pages: 34.

2012 marks the second year that Inside Higher Ed (an online news service) has surveyed senior leaders at American colleges and universities about the key challenges confronting these institutions. This year, a total of 1 002 campus chief executives responded to the survey, providing input from across a broad range of the US higher education system’s sectors and segments. Respondents were granted complete anonymity so that they could answer frankly, but their answers were coded by institution type, allowing for analysis of responses by sector.

Declining government support tops the list of concerns for presidents at all institution types, with more than 80% of presidents saying that potential cuts to federal student aid programmes will be a major challenge for their institutions in the next two or three years. Amongst other key results, the financial outlook for public and private colleges and universities is diverging after several years of cuts for all institutions. Public college and university presidents were more likely than their private non-profit and for-profit peers to say they expected to face budget shortfalls in the next few years. Meanwhile, reflecting pressure on institutions to prove their value and show that their students are learning, presidents ranked issues of academic quality and student learning just below a set of financial concerns at the top of their lists of the biggest challenges facing their institutions. But while half of all campus leaders listed "student assessment and educational outcomes" as a "very important" issue, less than a third of presidents of public and private doctoral institutions did so.
 
Inside Higher Ed