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Book: "DROPOUTS! Their Voices, Critical Junctures & A College's Response" (link to order) Book/Memoir: "Acting Normal: An Autistic, Blue-Collar Kid Stumbles Through Life" (link to order) Book: "Thinking About Organizations: 11 1/2 Essays on Higher Education" (link to order) Book: "The Death and Life of Great American Community Colleges" (link to order) Book: "How to Build a Strategic College Financial Planning Model" (link to order) Book: "Concepts in College & University Financial Administration" (link to order) Book: "LaGuardia Institutional Research" (link to order) Book: "Assessing Administrative Systems" (link to order) Book: "The Strategic Attitude" (link to order) Book: "University Budgeting for Beginners" (link to order)
Book: "Asking the Right Questions: A Guide for College and University Trustees" (link to order) LaGuardia Institutional Research Papers 2009-17 Essay: "Budget Systems Development" (review & download) Essay: "Do Colleges and Universities Resemble Memphis Under the Ptolemies?" (click to download) Essay: "Taking the Corona Crisis as an Opportunity to Think Strategically" (click to download) Essay: "Thoughts on Becoming a Higher Education Consultant" (click to download) Essay: "Training AI to be as Irrational as Humans: Can AI Beat the Market?" (click to download)
Poetry Collection "In a Flat Snake's Memory: Kinda Like Poetry" Order from Amazon Publication history (click to download) Translation: "The Two Brothers" by Alexandre Dumas (from French) Magical Thinking in Higher Education: Leadership, Branding, Strategic Planning & Other Systems Nathan Dickmeyer Magical Thinking in Higher Education: Leadership, Branding, Strategic Planning & Other Systems Using systems assessment, this book shows how to break through the barriers imposed by magical thinking and myths. Rebranding and strategic planning seldom result in the sort of strategic change many institutions need to survive. The Peter Principle is defeatist when the solution to ineffective leadership can be found in building teams and tearing down organizational pyramids. Institutions think they sell degrees, but their greatest product is personal transformation. Students are not the only market; Communities must also be served. Institutional change does not happen by assessing people and offices but by assessing and improving the systems that run across divisions and that ensure institutional survival and excellence. Magical Thinking in Higher Education: Leadership, Branding, Strategic Planning & Other Systems Order from Amazon
DROPOUTS! Their Voices, Critical Junctures & A College's Response Sam Michalowski, Nathan Dickmeyer DROPOUTS! Their Voices, Critical Junctures & A College's Response: As colleges and universities face enrollment challenges, retaining students to the completion of their degrees becomes critical. In our analysis of interviews with fifty-five students who had dropped from full-time to part-time, stopped out, or dropped out, we began to understand the challenges these students faced: taking classes while working, dealing with family issues and childcare, adjusting to a new language and culture, filling in gaps in their earlier education, and dealing with college rules.
Many students, and nearly all community college students, arrive at college under stress. A single incident, which we call a “Critical Juncture, on top of their everyday stress can cause them to drop out. While many critical junctures occur outside the college, a boss who changes hours, a family sickness, a flat tire, many happen inside‚ a hard to understand professor, inadequate advice. Colleges can do more to keep students in school: encourage help-seeking, examine rules that unnecessarily knock students out, or provide focused assistance.
Included with this book is a stochastic model of institutional response to dropping out. Users can input their own data and test the impact of methods for increasing retention, like improving help-seeking or advising.
DROPOUTS! Their Voices, Critical Junctures & A College's Response Order from Amazon
Acting Normal: An Autistic, Blue-Collar Kid Stumbles Through Life Nathan Dickmeyer Acting Normal: An Autistic, Blue-Collar Kid Stumbles Through Life: A memoir of an interesting life. I grew up small with migraines and deep social anxiety. Starting off in a small town in Michigan with a Jewish mother and Lutheran father fresh off a dustbowl farm by way of the battlefields of France and Germany. I was an overprotected and cautious child. Yet, I worked my way through college as a gardener, welder, millwright, foundry foreman, and steelmill metallurgist. I bicycled across the country, ran a marathon, and cross-country skied deep into snowy Yosemite to camp. I'm afraid of the telephone, but I was a college vice president at six institutions, getting fired twice for clumsy interactions. The key to my life has been to act as though I were normal, regardless of how I've felt. It worked most of the time. I thank my mother for putting me on the stage and for my love of music. This is my story.
Acting Normal: An Autistic, Blue-Collar Kid Stumbles Through Life Order from Amazon
Thinking About Organizations: 11 1/2 Essays on Higher Education Nathan Dickmeyer Thinking About Organizations: 11 1/2 Essays on Higher Education: These essays cover topics often neglected in academic descriptions of effective teams and organizations. Why do teams need people with a variety of thinking styles: divergent, convergent, inductive, deductive, and other ways of approaching challenges? What are the roles that people take within effective teams, besides chairperson, like facilitators, scribes, and ratifiers? How can we help team members understand the impact that a variety of cultures has on the working of a team? What is the optimum project development process for effective teams? What can we do to avoid the bind imposed by standard styles of personnel evaluation? How can we avoid the rigidity enforced by hierarchy? How can we shift the metaphor for dealing with students from the assembly line to individual crafting? Why are meetings killing us? What is wrong with goals today? Why should we be concerned with integrity in education? How can we use our skills at group facilitation to lead?
Thinking About Organizations: 11 1/2 Essays on Higher Education: Order from Amazon Or, download individual essays: Essay 1: Thinking Styles in a Team Essay 2: Thinking About Roles on a Team Essay 8: Meetings, Texts, and emails: Oh My! Essay 9: Thoughts on Goal Setting Essay 10: Thoughts on Integrity Essay 11: Leading by Facilitating The Death and Life of Great American Community Colleges Nathan Dickmeyer The Death and Life of Great American Community Colleges: Community colleges are facing turbulent times. High school graduating classes are shrinking. Four-year institutions, needing to bolster their own enrollments, are poaching less-than-college-ready students. The economic environment is destabilizing. Technology has replaced many of the traditional functions of faculty in degree programs. Middle class jobs are disappearing, rendering associate degrees meaningless, while in the “new economy" knowledge and skill must be continuously upgraded, degrading the worth of any degree. This book examines these trends, the forces behind them, and the likelihood they will continue or be reversed. Each trend has an impact on community colleges. The principles underlying current community college design are seen as inhibitors of an adequate response to these challenges. In its penultimate chapter this book presents a new set of principles and design ideas. Community colleges are urged to evolve.
The Death and Life of Great American Community Colleges: Order from Amazon Asking the Right Questions II: A Business and "Quant" Primer for College Presidents Nathan Dickmeyer Asking the Right Questions II: A Business and "Quant" Primer for College Presidents: How does a president ask about the financial condition of a college? What would an informative and accurate answer look like? What assumptions should be questioned? What do the answers mean? Is there an appropriate response to these answers? This book presents 30 great questions on finance, marketing, facilities, risk, faculty load, and administrative strength along with the form of good answers, an explanation of meaning, assumptions, context, and possible responses. The book is designed to prepare presidents to respond to questions from boards and accreditation visiting teams and to understand their college better.
Asking the Right Questions II: A Business and "Quant" Primer for College Presidents: Order from Amazon How to Build a Strategic College Financial Planning Model Nathan Dickmeyer and Sam Michalowski How to Build a Strategic College Financial Planning Model: This book was designed for Institutional Research and for Finance professionals who wish to develop deficit-free financial strategies for their colleges. With downloadable sample spreadsheets, this book moves from simple financial revenue and expense projections through enrollment projections, on to cash flow and balance sheets, and to FASB/GASB IPEDS conforming models with endowment and plant submodels in seven stages. Readers are encouraged to begin with the simplest model to build an understanding of their college's financial dynamics. The models are interactive to encourage users to test and understand the power of each strategic variable, whether it be the rate of increase of salaries, the rate of increase of tuition, financial aid policy variables, or the size of the student body. These models are designed to help college administrations search for financial strategies that keep their college's from running deficits.(Spreadsheets may be downloaded below.)
How to Build a Strategic Financial Planning Model: Order from Amazon Concepts in College & University Financial Administration Nathan Dickmeyer
Concepts in College & University Financial Administration: Concepts is intended for higher education students interested in finance and continuing administrators seeking to understand better the conceptual universe of the higher education finance professional. The concepts include financial equilibrium, financial strategies, optimum pricing, ratio analysis, risk, cost analysis, opportunity cost, financial buffers, primary planning variables, financial modeling, budgeting processes and products, problem analysis, solution structures, and team development. Each chapter includes exercises to demonstrate the concepts. It can be used as a text in a higher education finance course. (Spreadsheets for exercises may be downloaded below.)
Concepts in College and University Financial Administration: Order from Amazon Spreadsheet data: Chapter 2, Case 1 LaGuardia Institutional Research: Techniques & Findings Nathan Dickmeyer LaGuardia Institutional Research: In 2008 LaGuardia Community College gathered a team of institutional researchers to assist it in achieving success. This book brings together 60 studies undertaken by the team that explore the effectiveness of policies, the forces thwarting retention to graduation, the effectiveness of interventions, models of student persistence, and financial models.
The studies present the analytic techniques used by the team to measure stresses and successes quickly and effectively. Links to all papers and to several spreadsheet models are provided in the book.
While the techniques will be of most help to institutional researchers, the greater understanding of student retention behavior developed in the findings will be useful to all higher education professionals.
LaGuardia Institutional Research: Order from Amazon Assessing Administrative Systems: Guiding Change in Colleges & Universities Nathan Dickmeyer Assessing Administrative Systems urges readers to end the wasteful practice of assessing offices and people. Colleges and universities operate through systems that connect offices. These systems include strategic planning, budgeting, student development, leadership, and student financial support. People across the institution connect through procedures and handoffs that make these systems operational. Dysfunction occurs when a system doesn't work, not an office. Planning fails because the planning system fails, not the planning office. Administrative Systems Assessment is a how-to guide for assessing and fixing systems in a way that can change and improve an institution. Diagraming systems and specific procedures for finding and correcting flaws are developed in the book.
Assessing Administrative Systems: Order from Amazon
The Strategic Attitude: Integrating Strategic Planning into Daily University Worklife
Nathan Dickmeyer Chief financial officers in today's universities are so busy with the challenges of day-to-day management that strategic thinking often takes a back seat. And yet planning for strategic change can go a long way toward streamlining the very daily tasks that obscure the "big picture." Learning how to integrate strategic thinking into day-to-day management can transform an institution into a strategic organization that operates with an effective understanding of environment, mission, and values. Nathan Dickmeyer brings his many years as a consultant, chief financial officer, member of accreditation teams, and higher education researcher and writer to this insightful discussion of strategic thinking from the CFO's point of view. He shares lessons learned from hundreds of experiences and pinpoints common problems and common-sense solutions in planning and management. Chief financial officers, planning officers, presidents, and other administrative staff involved in the strategic planning process will benefit from Dickmeyer's integrative approach. Fictional vignettes, based on hundreds of one-on-one experiences in a variety of university settings, illustrate the problems of the classic approach to planning and show how "on the job" strategic thinking works.
The Strategic Attitude: Integrating Strategic Planning into Daily University Worklife Budgets and Budgeting for College and University Department Chairs: How to Maximize Department Resources Nathan Dickmeyer (The truth about budgets and budgeting for faculty.) "Budgets and Budgeting for College and University Department Chairs" Order from Amazon New Papers for Download Budget System Design: Choosing Among RCB, ZBB and Incremental Why choose Responsibility Center Budgeting, Zero-based Budgeting or Incremental Budgeting? This paper outlines the institutional characteristics, strategies, intentions, and conditions that lead to a particular budget system design that fits.
Asking the Right Questions: A Guide for College and University Trustees A guide for college and university board members organized around plans and policies. Each chapter reframes common business questions into the language of higher education. College and university administrators will want to refer to this book to understand better the kinds of business questions trustees bring to plan presentations. Each chapter concentrates on a plan from the strategic plan to the leadership plan. "Asking the Right Questions: A Guide for College and University Trustees" Order from Amazon Making "God" Decisions: Ventilator Allocation and Prestigious College Admissions This essay describes a method for making multiple value decisions, like allocating ventilators to seriously ill Covid patients and like admitting students to prestigious universities. These decisions are often called "god" decisions because of the effect on the lives of those concerned and the strong disagreement on the appropriate criteria for making them. The method was developed in the 1970s by Merrill Flood, a founding member of the management science field, which he called dynamic value voting. The method begins similarly to distributive voting, but uses these scores only set the probabilities for a random choice, making Fate the final decision maker. Essay: "Making "God" Decisions: Ventilator Allocation and Prestigious College Admissions" (Click to download)
Spreadsheet for "God" Decisions (Click to download) The Peculiar Adventures of Far-Seeing Greta, Following Commo Perry to Japan This epic poem accompanies 150 paintings by Bruce Brooks. The paintings were done on the pages of a copy of "Commodore Perry in Japan," An American Heritage Junior Library book. The poem describes the adventures of Far-Seeing Greta as she follows the path of Commo Perry more than a century before. Her boat is powered by solar sails with a crew of endangered animals and an old man. She hopes her mission to Japan will dissuade them from building sixteen new coal-fired power plants. The poem and paintings may be downloaded in their entirety (62 mb) or in eight sections, none greater than 11 mb. Part One: Beginning the Voyage (7 mb) Part Two-a: The Atlantic (11 mb) Part Two-b: (continued) (8 mb) Part Two-c: (continued) (7 mb) Part Three: Around Africa (9 mb) Part Four: The Indian Ocean (11 mb) Part Five: China and On to Japan (10 mb) The Two Brothers by Alexandre Dumas Translated and adapted by The Two Brothers is based on an Alexander Dumas (père) fairy tale written during one of the two periods in which he wrote stories for children. In The Two Brothers Dumas creates several magical scenes where five different animals talk and do the bidding of the brothers. In these episodes each animal repeats a phrase or action in a way that is delightfully childlike. The tale develops the moral strengths of brotherhood, perseverance, patience, truth, courage, and faithfulness. The loyalty and fellowship of the five animals, all natural enemies, echoes and reinforces the story’s moral themes. Each brother and his animals becomes a family, where the clash of characters is both colorful and a source of strength. "The Two Brothers" published by Bahar Books, Order from Amazon Download audio (left click plays on iPad/Mac/Safari only; right click to save):
Chapter 1 (right click to download)
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