Over the summer, UCO earned a spot on the Chronicle for Higher Education’s annual list of “Great Colleges to Work For.”
In addition, they earned the 2011 Innovation Award from the National Association of College and University Business Officers for implementing “lean practices” and making non-facility school functions more efficient.
UCO was ranked “best in class” in three separate categories on the “Great Colleges to Work For” list; in “professional career development opportunities,” “work-life balance” and “supervisor/department chair relationship.” They also scored very good to excellent in five categories out of 15 total.
“(The Chronicle for Higher Education) runs these surveys on standardized questions, and a whole bunch of different scales, and they send them out ot colleges and universities across the nation and people who want to participate,” Steve Kreidler, UCO Executive Vice President, said. “And then people answer directly to the survey. There’s no compiling here at the university, we have no idea what people answer, so in that case it makes it a reasonable comparison against other schools.”
In the Carnegie Master’s classification, which groups together larger universities that are lacking a PhD. program, UCO met or exceeded the benchmarks in all categories except one, and scored higher on the survey average.
According to Bob Ault, special assistant to Kreidler, 600 people from UCO participated in the survey, and the university was ranked against 309 other schools from around the country.
“This is how people on our campus feel about this school, not how administrators feel about it,” Kreidler said. “This is a pretty big sample.”
The university was also among four schools to win the 2011 NACUBO Innovation Award, and is the only school to have done so three times since the inaugural award was given in 2007.
“Since about 2007, (NACUBO) has given the only award they give to universities, and they call it the Innovation Award. And they give this award to the most innovative idea in the nation, to any school or university that has the most innovative idea in our field,” Kreidler said.
This year UCO won the award for its “Lean University” program.
“Lean University cuts out things that someone as a student wouldn’t notice today as much as someone would have if they would have been here eight years ago and were still here today,” Kreidler said. “Places where students had to wait in long, long lines; it still seems like you wait a long time in financial aid, except it’s about a tenth of the waiting that you used to have to go through.”
Kreidler said that the school has “leaned up” roughly 65 processes across campus, and has been teaching this program to universities all over the country.