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University Futures, Library Futures: a multi-dimensional model of US higher education institutions

HangTogether.org: “Over the last several months, OCLC Research has been working to develop a framework for exploring emerging directions in US higher education, to better understand the institutional needs that academic libraries will need to support and advance in years to come. We undertook this work as part of an ongoing collaboration with Ithaka S+R on our University Futures, Library Futures project, generously supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Our framework is informed by an extensive literature review examining current scholarship on the US higher education landscape, which identified a range of factors important in shaping institutional direction that are imperfectly or inadequately captured in current typologies. For example, it is widely recognized that the changing demographics of student enrollment (e.g. increasing ethnic diversity, growing share of adult and part-time learners) is altering institutional approaches to advancing student success in colleges and universities with different enrollment profiles, yet the commonly used basic Carnegie categories reveal little about the character of the prevailing educational model. A Baccalaureate College–Arts & Sciences institution that is actively growing an online baccalaureate completion program targeting adult learners will look very different from a Baccalaureate Colleges–Arts & Sciences institution with a robust full-time, first-time undergraduate enrollment pipeline. Similarly the institutional profile of a Doctoral Universities: Highest Research Activity institution pursuing an aggressive strategy to diversify its undergraduate enrollment while improving retention and completion, will be different from a similarly classed research university with a highly selective undergraduate enrollment…”

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