Carrie Lew, director of alumni relations and career development for the USC School of Social Work, has been selected as the university's scholarship recipient to attend this year's Summer Institute for Women in Higher Education Administration at Bryn Mawr College in suburban Philadelphia.

The June 23 to July 18 sessions are sponsored by Higher Education Resources Services and Bryn Mawr College.

The summer institute offers three weeks of intensive training addressing issues currently facing higher education, management and governance of colleges and universities, and new perspectives on teaching, research and service, said Linda Rock, vice president of Women in Management who coordinates selection of USC candidates.

Rock, who is associate dean for administration in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, said that participants consider a range of subjects – from budgeting and handling personnel issues to deciding on their own professional development plans. Twenty-five current or former USC faculty and staff members have attended the institutes since 1984.

Donna Bean, assistant dean for finance and administration at the USC Marshall School of Business, said that when she attended the summer institute in 2005, she was the only budget and finance person there.

Faculty members tended to regard budget officers "as adversaries rather than potential allies," and she wanted to change that. When she returned to USC, she and her finance team started planning their budget by talking to people first about what they needed to do their jobs before they ever focused on the numbers. "It worked great," she said, adding that "we call ourselves budget advocates now."

The second major idea with which Bean said she returned to campus concerned helping people plan their career goals. "One of the segments of the institute's process is self-examination of your own career," she said, adding that she wanted to do something better in that regard for the business school staff.

The USC Marshall School staff has started using software for performance evaluation that has a module for setting one's goals. It's interactive, she said, and helps employees and their supervisors measure progress.

The summer institute began in 1976 with the goal of improving the status of women in the middle and executive levels of higher education administration, an area in which women traditionally had been underrepresented.

Nearly 2,000 women, faculty and administrators from the United States, Canada, South Africa, Saudi Arabia and other countries have participated in the residential program. Last summer 74 percent of the women worked at public institutions, most of them universities and nearly half of them with enrollments of more than 20,000 students. Seventy-nine percent of the participants had doctorates and 40 percent were faculty members while 36 percent were staff involved in academic affairs.

Adrianna Kezar, associate professor of higher education in the USC Rossier School of Education, has taught at the institute a number of times over the last decade. This summer she will be teaching about working with governing boards. She also has taught about the impact of privatization and market forces on higher education and about developing leadership on their campuses.

Even though the institutes are relatively short, Kezar has found that they "actually can have a profound impact" on women's careers. And she learns from the participants too.

"I teach leadership in education, and I'm there and I'm interacting suddenly with 50 to 60 practicing administrators who are looking at their own leadership, their own institutions and the landscape of higher education," she said. "They want to make a difference."

When she returns to her own classes, she brings with her the experience of people from across the country who are working at a range of schools, including community colleges or liberal arts schools. "I bring back more practical experience from the field and a national perspective. Over the years I've worked with people from several hundred different institutions, and I think that helps our students."

Each year the university, under the auspices of the senior vice president for administration, sponsors the candidacy of a faculty or staff member for admission to the summer institute and provides funding for her tuition, housing and transportation. USC's Women in Management organization coordinates the application process and provides recommendations to Senior Vice President Todd Dickey.

Rock said that recruitment for candidates for the 2008 institute will begin in mid-fall with the deadline for USC faculty and staff hoping to participate falling on Jan. 18, 2008.

She hopes that more faculty members will apply so that they can receive the kind of training the institute offers. "Often they don't get this training, and they may decide to become department chairs or heads of centers or deans and need this management background," she said.