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Residential academic campuses generally support a skewed population profile that favours a younger population, mainly the student community, and thereby marginalize the needs of the older people staying within the campus. Health delivery systems are often not in accordance with the needs of staff members co-habiting with their aged parents and relatives as well as older staff members themselves. This poses a serious problem, especially in India, where filial piety is a norm and many employees cohabit with their parents. Moreover, the Government of India has reformulated its retirement policy under which the age for superannuation of teaching staff has been enhanced. This in turn, has raised the older-younger ratio in campuses in recent years. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

To address these issues, a household survey was carried out on older people staying in a residential academic campus of India followed by a focus group discussion with family caregivers of the older people.

It was found that older people were a marginalized group in campus, as health delivery system and allied facilities were not consistent with their needs. As a result, they and their family caregivers faced various challenges.

This is the first study exploring the possibility of academic campuses in India to emerge as alternate sites for supporting older care.

The University of South Carolina’s child development lab school faced extinction because of campus renewal projects and shifting priorities. Shrinking state budgets ended subsidies for small-scale programs at the same time the university was privatizing non-essential services. It became apparent that we needed to forge new partnerships and explore innovative funding strategies if the center was to continue providing quality childcare on our research university campus. Our five-year-long struggle has culminated with the creation of a unique public/private partnership linking the management expertise and investment capital of a for-profit childcare provider with the resources and professional knowledge at the state’s flagship university. After the framework for the public/private partnership had been created the state’s Department of Health and Human Services and Educational Television joined to create a center of excellence that will be a demonstration site for the entire early childhood community. We believe the partnership we have created is a sustainable solution to the campus childcare dilemma, one that will keep quality childcare and related research and teaching on our campus. The partnership we have created can serve as a sustainable model for other programs faced with shrinking budgets, eroding support, and threats to their existence.

When Brent McBride and Nancy Barbour approached me with a proposal for an Advances in Early Education and Day Care theme volume on child development laboratory schools, I was eager to pursue the topic with them. This Advances series has always been dedicated serving as a forum to furthering the knowledge base on all aspects of early education, broadly defined. The disciplinary roots of the field are necessarily interdisciplinary, reflecting the range of disciplines that are relevant to us, including sociology, psychology, policy studies, curriculum studies, history, and related fields. A fair amount of our existing knowledge base was generated in campus laboratory programs, which were designed to be interdisciplinary, as Barbour shows us in her chapter in this volume. At the same time, I am aware of some of the turmoil and transformation that has shaken campus child development programs over the past two decades (Keyes, 1991); venerable programs have closed, converted from nursery schools to child care, altered to reflect communities beyond the ivory tower of campus, or asked to do things that they had never done in the past. What might a special volume on campus laboratory programs for children tell us about the state of knowledge, and the state of the field of early childhood education and care?

Although child development laboratory programs share a common history and a commitment to a three-part mission of teaching, research, and outreach, they vary in the ways their programs are structured. At the same time, lab schools are being confronted by new challenges that have put many of these programs at-risk for cutbacks in support and/or closure. The diversity that can be found in the structure of lab schools has made it difficult for these programs to collaborate on ways to address the challenges they face on a daily basis. The purpose of this chapter is to present findings from a national survey of lab schools, with a goal of identifying common issues and challenges being faced by programs regardless of their structure. Results are used to identify critical issues lab schools must address in order to continue playing an important role in bridging theory, research, and practice in the field of early childhood education.

Child development laboratory programs relying heavily on department and university funding can face unique economic challenges due to the constant shifts in academic resources. Many programs have faced elimination during times of financial crisis at their institutions. The purpose of this chapter is to present a variety of creative financing strategies for child development lab schools to address these economic challenges. The focus is on strategies that bring financial stability to programs and lessen the reliance on university funds for viability. It is equally important for lab schools to be highly integrated with the mission of their institution to prevent funding dilemmas. For many administrators this means addressing the research, teaching and service missions of their programs. A case study of one child development laboratory school faced with elimination will also be presented.

Evaluates a methodology which was developed to measure student satisfaction with significant components of the service experience delivered to students at Edge Hill University College. Uses a questionnaire‐based survey to collect information on student satisfaction. The methodology has two unique features: the Student Charter informed the survey design; and student responses were collected electronically through on‐screen questionnaires accessible over an intranet. Outcomes suggest that there remains some resistance to the completion of an electronic questionnaire and both paper and electronic versions are likely to continue to be necessary in order to achieve optimum response rates. The methodology has identified specific aspects of the service experience where there was either an absence of student satisfaction or the level of student satisfaction was variable. These aspects have been further explored with focus groups and fed into the quality plan for the college. A “negative quality” model is proposed which may offer a framework for response to different types of feedback from students.

Purpose – Academic campuses in India in recent years have witnessed an increase in the proportion of older people due to the rise in the age of superannuation of faculty and their cohabitation with older parents. However, such campuses continue to have a skewed program which favor the needs of the younger population. For the present study, a residential academic campus equipped with a health care facility was selected to understand the challenges of the family caregivers of older people residing in it.

Methodology/Approach – Exploratory in-depth interviews were conducted with 154 family caregivers. Secondary data were obtained from the campus hospital records.

Findings – Data revealed that family caregivers experienced various challenges in providing older care in the campus due to unavailability of paid supportive caregivers, lack of community support, and inadequate housing. Though the academic campus has a health care facility, the entitlement rights to it varies among the older people in campus. While the campus health facility was not congenial for family caregiving, it was utilized as a space for providing long-term care. This chapter suggests the need to extend a public heath model of family caregiving in campus.

Research limitations/implications – The study has implication for modifying similar academic campuses in India for facilitating family caregivers of older people.

Originality/Value of Paper – This is the first study of its kind which explored the challenges of family caregiving for older people in academic campuses in India.

This paper provides an overview of the main results of a Department of Health‐funded research project which investigated the quality and costs of residential supports for people with learning disabilities. The main findings were that the adjusted costs of community‐based supports were higher than residential campuses and village communities; within community‐based provision there were no statistically significant differences between the adjusted costs of supported living, small group homes and group homes for 4‐6 people; community‐based provision and village communities offered better care than residential campuses; there appeared to be distinct benefits associated with community‐based provision and village communities; within community‐based provision there were benefits associated with smaller size and supported living arrangements.

What is the rhetoric that higher education institutions use when they develop and publish policies to improve student retention? Using the organization literature on institutional environments, this study examines the nature and evolution of institutional rhetoric used by three public universities in a single state over a 20‐year period. Consistent with the intent of the larger volume, this study provides an example of how the frameworks and concepts provided by organization theory can be used to complicate thinking about educational organizations.

Stinchcombe's definition of institutions as “communities of fate” and key concepts from the organizational ecology and institutional literatures provide the framework for this study. Using a qualitative methodology, over 2,800 retention‐oriented statements were used as study data. These were analyzed using codes generated from the institutional theory and student‐retention literatures.

Study data suggest that, while each institution developed a unique, defining identity over time, an institutional isomorphism emerged around student‐retention in these same institutions. This ideology centered on the creation of a “caring and student‐friendly” campus environment and played an important role in the development of student‐retention policies on each campus.

Research in student retention theory and policy has almost exclusively studied retention practice and student persistence. The research for this paper was deliberately designed to operationalize theoretical concepts in organizational ecology literature and to examine their manifestation in universities over time.