Rider president pens article on managing and measuring the college investment

To be successful, every college or university must be able to enhance, measure and demonstrate the value of the education they offer to students, writes President Gregory G. Dell’Omo, Ph.D., in the latest issue of Presidential Perspectives, a monthly leadership series written by college and university presidents. He argues that the topic of investment is particularly important in today’s competitive and rapidly changing higher education environment.

Now in its 10th year, Presidential Perspectives is higher education leadership series written by notable college presidents leading innovative institutions. A new chapter is released once a month on www.presidentialperspectives.org to create an annual issue of 12 chapters. This year’s theme is "Innovative Concepts to Achieve Campus Transformation.” At the end of the year, all the chapters are combined into a bound printed book. 

In Dell’Omo’s chapter, “Managing the College Investment and Measuring Its Return,” he recounts some of the successful programs he helped to develop at Robert Morris University, where he was president for 10 years before joining Rider in August 2015.

One of them, the College Affordability Academy, trains those in recruitment and enrollment how to be transparent in discussing the challenges of financing a college education. The goal of the initiative was to provide staff with the information prospective students and their families need to make informed decisions.

“(Admission counselors) have to demonstrate that our graduates have great jobs and great lives, but also help them understand, in the plainest terms, what their education will cost and how they can finance it,” Dell’Omo writes.

In creating the program, 50 members from across the university met regularly, eventually producing capstone projects, such as a video that highlights the right and wrong actions of financing a college education. “Other educational institutions have inquired about buying these modules, as no other tool of this type appears to be available,” Dell’Omo writes.

The College Affordability Program, which received favorable coverage in The Chronicle of Higher Education, helps prospective students understand how they can keep their investment in a college education as manageable as possible — one of the three key questions every college or university must answer, according to Dell’Omo. He believes every successful college or university will also have to explain what the return on investment of a college degree is and how that value is measured.

Positive placement rates after graduation have traditionally been an effective way to demonstrate the return on investment of a college degree. “But I thought we needed to dig a little deeper into how our alumni fare, and what aspects of an RMU education contribute to their success,” Dell’Omo writes. “Let’s face it: this is not something that our industry has been very good at.”

To unearth more data, Dell’Omo had RMU partner with Gallup to create an alumni survey to compare their answers with the polling firm’s national sample. Previously, Gallup’s data had identified six undergraduate experiences that predicted career success and personal well-being. Much of those experiences dovetailed with Dell’Omo’s increased emphasis on experiential learning. For example, in 2009, he led the push to create the Student Engagement Transcript, a second transcript that documents a student’s co-curricular activities.

The polling provided a nuanced set of data that went beyond more simplistic measures commonly used by colleges and universities. For instance, the survey measured how enthusiastic and loyal RMU graduates were in their working lives, finding that they were more likely to be engaged in their jobs than other college graduates. “The RMU Gallup Survey results show that students are reaping a return on their investment, and that their experiences at RMU have a positive impact on their future professional and personal lives,” Dell’Omo explains in his chapter.

Understanding how to enhance, measure and demonstrate the value of an RMU education helped guide the university’s strategic planning under Dell’Omo, whose tenure as president was marked by a period of growth so significant that Pittsburgh Magazine recently referred to the past 10 years at RMU as “The Dell’Omo Decade.”