Education Commons^™

2014 Reporting Of Sexual Assault: Institutional Comparisons, M. E. Karns

Research Studies and Reports

Institutions of higher education are required to submit annual reports of sexual assault crimes to the Department of Education under the Clery Act. The Department of Education makes this data publicly available. Two primary measures are used to assess reporting of assault on campus: the Assault Reporting Ratio (ARR) and the Reporting Rate per 10,000 students (R10K). These measures are easily calculated and can be used to assess practices and policies that impact the reporting of sexual assault on campus.

The ARR and R10K are rate comparisons, a method widely used in public health. These rate comparisons measure how ...

We Don’T Count: The Invisibility Of Teaching Librarians In Statistics On Academic Instructional Labor, Aliqae Geraci

Articles and Chapters

[Excerpt] The field of library and information science (LIS) has seen a tremendous growth of interest and activity in postsecondary library instruction since the American Library Association Presidential Committee on Information Literacy released its Final Report in 1989. In subsequent decades, academic libraries and librarians moved beyond traditional bibliographic instruction (BI) to embrace the pursuit of information literacy (IL), despite a historical skepticism of librarians’ place within a teaching domain traditionally reserved by disciplinary faculty in the postsecondary setting. Libraries’ centering of the IL mission has been accompanied by librarians’ turn to library instruction as one vehicle for pursuing it ...

Reporting Of Sexual Assault: Institutional Comparisons, 2013, M. E. Karns

Research Studies and Reports

How well are colleges counting sexual assaults that occur on their campuses? This paper provides two measures, the Assault Reporting Ratio (ARR) and the Reporting Rate per 10,000 students (R10K), that address this question. The ARR and R10K are benchmarks that identify institutions that are leading in this area. The measures facilitate comparisons across institutions and over time. The measures enable administrators and researchers to evaluate the effectiveness of institutional policies and practices that govern the reporting of sexual assault.

The Clery Act requires institutions of higher education to notify the Department of Education annually about the number of ...

Group-Average Observables As Controls For Sorting On Unobservables When Estimating Group Treatment Effects: The Case Of School And Neighborhood Effects, Joseph G. Altonji, Richard K. Mansfield

Working Papers

We consider the classic problem of estimating group treatment effects when individuals sort based on observed and unobserved characteristics. Using a standard choice model, we show that controlling for group averages of observed individual characteristics potentially absorbs all the across-group variation in unobservable individual characteristics. We use this insight to bound the treatment effect variance of school systems and associated neighborhoods for various outcomes. Across four datasets, our conservative estimates indicate that a 90th versus 10th percentile school system increases high school graduation and college enrollment probabilities by at least 0.047 and 0.11. Other applications include measurement of ...

American Higher Education In Transition, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Articles and Chapters

[Excerpt] In public higher education, tuition increases in recent decades have barely offset a long-run decline in state appropriations per full-time equivalent student. State appropriations per full-time equivalent student at public higher educational institutions averaged $6,454 in fiscal year 2010; at its peak in fiscal year 1987, the comparable number (in constant dollars) was $7,993 (State Higher Education Executive Officers 2011, figure 3), translating into a decline of 19 percent over the period. Even if one leaves out the "Great Recession," real state appropriations per full-time equivalent student were still lower in fiscal year 2008 than they were ...

Adverse Selection And Incentives In An Early Retirement Program, Kenneth T. Whelan, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Kevin F. Hallock, Ronald L. Seeber

Articles and Chapters

We evaluate potential determinants of enrollment in an early retirement incentive program for non-tenure-track employees of a large university. Using administrative record on the eligible population of employees not covered by collective bargaining agreements, historical employee count and layoff data by budget units, and public information on unit budgets, we find dips in per-employee finance in a budget unit during the application year and higher recent per employee layoffs were associated with increased probabilities of eligible employee program enrollment. Our results also suggest, on average, that employees whose salaries are lower than we would predict given their personal characteristics and ...

Vernon Briggs: Real-World Labor Economist, William P. Curington

Articles and Chapters

[Excerpt] Vernon Briggs stepped into a wastebasket and launched my career as a labor economist. In the spring of 1969, I was sleepwalking through the undergraduate economics program at the University of Texas and sitting in Dr. Briggs’s labor economics class. He was vigorously making a point when his misstep off the small classroom stage produced a roar of laughter but did not break his train of thought. He woke me up; I thought, “Man, I want to be as passionate about my life’s work as this guy.

Six Questions And A Strategy For Campus-Wide Information Competence, Stuart Basefsky

Working Papers

[Excerpt] At Cornell University Library (CUL) a committee was set up in January 2005 to address the issue of information literacy at the university. The committee did extensive research on this topic and developed an approach for seeking solutions. In the course of these deliberations, I volunteered to create two items to serve as the basis for ensuing discussions.

1. a conceptual framework for this policy initiative (included in this article)

2. a document that outlines the basic or core competencies common to all constituents of what is called the Cornell community (the result was the six questions which are ...

Introduction To Doctoral Education And The Faculty Of The Future, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Articles and Chapters

[Excerpt] Concern has been expressed, however, that the growing enrollment of foreign students in American PhD programs "crowds out" potential American citizen PhD holders and discourages them from pursuing PhD study. On the other hand, the aftermath of 9/11, the growth of research infrastructure and research support in other nations, and the growth of other nations' higher education systems all cast doubt on the ability of the United States to continue to rely on foreign PhD holders to meet our nation's need for scientific researchers and to fill future faculty positions.

Given all of these issues, in October ...

Recent Trends In Funding For The Academic Humanities And Their Implications, Harriet Zuckerman, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Articles and Chapters

[Excerpt] Never abundant, financial support for the "academic humanities" is now scarce. How scarce it is, both in absolute and relative terms, and whether the humanities now confront particularly hard times, are the pressing questions. To piece together an answer, we ask first how much the government, foundations, and private donors provide for the humanities now compared to estimates John D'Arms made in 1995, when he completed his important review of "funding trends."

Then we probe expenditures universities and colleges make on the humanities. Is there evidence, for example, in institutional budget allocations that the humanities are holding their ...

Changing The Education Of Scholars: An Introduction To The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’S Graduate Education Initiative, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Harriet Zuckerman, Jeffrey A. Groen, Sharon M. Brucker

Articles and Chapters

[Excerpt] In 1991 the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation launched the Graduate Education Initiative (GEI) to improve the structure and organization of PhD programs in the humanities and social sciences and to combat the high rates of student attrition and long time to degree completion prevailing in these fields. While attrition and time to completion were deemed to be important in and of themselves, and of great significance to degree seekers, they were also seen more broadly as indicators of the effectiveness of graduate programs. An array of characteristics of doctoral programs was earmarked as likely contributors to high attrition and ...

Generation X: Redefining The Norms Of The Academy, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Articles and Chapters

[Excerpt] The members of Generation X are the young faculty members of today and the immediate future. The panelists at this session of the conference were asked to discuss the effects of this generation on academic norms and institutional governance and the types of new models that may be emerging for academia as a result of them. More specifically, they were asked if the attitudes and loyalties of these young faculty members really do differ from that of the Baby Boom Generation, how their attitudes and behavior affect graduate programs, what academic institutions will need to do to attract the ...

Education And Taiwan’S Changing Employment And Earnings Structure, Gary S. Fields, Amanda Newton Kraus

Articles and Chapters

[Excerpt] Between 1980 and 1992, the enormous changes in economic development in Taiwan had significant impacts on the island's labour market. Examples of these changes include the island's almost legendary and meteoric economic growth, the maintenance of essentially full employment, an increase of around 116 per cent in real labour earnings, considerable upgrading of the educational qualifications of the labour force as a whole, a sustained and systematic shift in the composition of the labour force from agriculture into manufacturing and services and occupational upgrading (defined as the expansion of the share of the labour force in the ...

Phd Attainment Of Graduates Of Selective Private Academic Institutions, Jeffrey A. Groen, Matthew P. Nagowski, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Articles and Chapters

[Excerpt] It is therefore important to understand the forces that have caused a decline in the PhD attainment rate of American college graduates. The fraction of bachelor's recipients who go on to receive PhDs nationwide is influenced by many factors, including high school graduation rates, college enrollment rates of high school graduates, college graduation rates for college enrollees, the distribution of undergraduate majors, and the academic backgrounds of college students. PhD attainment also depends upon changes in the economic rewards to pursuing PhD study relative to entering the workforce or pursuing study for other professional occupations, such as law ...

Gender Equity In Intercollegiate Athletics: Determinants Of Title Ix Compliance, Deborah J. Anderson, John J. Cheslock, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Articles and Chapters

[Excerpt The year 2002 marked the 30th anniversary of the passage of Title IX, which prohibits discrimination by gender in any federally funded educational activity. Although the scope of Title IX includes all aspects of education, the application of Title IX to college athletics has been especially complicated because athletics programs, unlike most academic classes, usually are sex-segregated by sport. As explained in more detail below, Title IX essentially requires that all institutes of higher education provide student access to sport participation on a gender-neutral basis. As a result, athletic opportunities for female undergraduates have expanded significantly since 1972. For ...

The Changing Nature Of The Faculty And Faculty Employment Practices, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Articles and Chapters

[Excerpt] The nature of faculty employment practices at American colleges and universities is changing rapidly. So too is the gender, racial and ethnic composition of American faculty members. These changes, along with the growing importance and costs of scientific research, the increased commercialization of faculty research, the elimination of mandatory retirement for tenured faculty members and the growing costs of retiree health insurance, the growing salary differentials across universities and academic fields within a university, and the growth of collective bargaining for tenured and tenure-track faculty and graduate assistants at public universities and now adjuncts at private universities, have put ...

Crafting A Class: The Trade-Off Between Merit Scholarships And Enrolling Lower-Income Students, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Liang Zhang, Jared M. Levin

Articles and Chapters

[Excerpt] It is well known that test scores are correlated with students’ socio-economic backgrounds. Hence, to the extent that colleges are successful in “buying” higher test-score students, one should expect that their enrollment of students from families in the lower tails of the family income distribution should decline. However, somewhat surprisingly, there have been no efforts to test if this is occurring.

Our paper presents such a test. While institutional-level data on the dollar amounts of merit scholarships offered by colleges and universities are not available, data are available on the number of National Merit Scholarship (NMS) winners attending an ...

The Many Facets Of Economic Mobility, Gary S. Fields

Articles and Chapters

[Excerpt] The main point of this chapter is to show that the different indices used in the mobility literature are not measures of the same underlying conceptual entity. In elementary statistics, students are taught that the mean and median are both measures of central tendency but they are different measures of central tendency; the variance and Gini coefficient are measures of dispersion but they are different measures of dispersion; and central tendency and dispersion are fundamentally different concepts from one another. In much the same way, this chapter maintains that the different mobility indices in common use are measuring fundamentally ...

Method Or Madness? Inside The U.S. News & World Report College Rankings, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Articles and Chapters

[Excerpt] The rankings exacerbate, but are not the major cause of the increased competition in American higher education that has taken place over the last few decades. The real shame is that this competition has institutions focusing on improving the selectivity of their entering first-year classes. Institutions appear to be increasingly valued for the test scores of the students they attract, not for their value added to their students and to society.

Inopportunity Of Gender: The G.I. Bill And The Higher Education Of The American Female, 1939-1954, Matthew P. Nagowski

Student Works

While the 1944 Serviceman’s Readjustment Act, commonly known as the G.I. Bill, has been instilled within the collective consciousness of the United States as one of the most overwhelmingly positive pieces of legislation in the nation’s history, there has been little empirical inquiry into the effect that it had on the non-veteran female. Both Marcus (2003) and Bound and Turner (2001) find that of the World War II veterans that obtained a higher education on the G.I. Bill, fully 20 percent of them, or 400,000, would not have attended college had it not been for ...

Involving Undergraduates In Research To Encourage Them To Undertake Ph.D. Study In Economics, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Articles and Chapters

[Excerpt] Recent evidence suggests that the growing use of part-time and full-time non-tenure-track faculty nationwide adversely influences American college students’ graduation rates (Ehrenberg and Liang Zhang, 2005). I have become concerned that the increased usage of non-tenure track faculty members also likely adversely influences the propensity of undergraduate students to go on for Ph.D.s in economics for two reasons.

First, many students enter college with the expressed intent of becoming doctors or lawyers, getting an MBA, or going on for advanced degrees in the sciences or humanities. However, with the exception perhaps of the small number of high-school ...

The Changing Nature Of Faculty Employment, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Liang Zhang

Articles and Chapters

[Excerpt] The last two decades of the twentieth century saw a significant growth in the shares of faculty members in American colleges and universities that are part-time or are full-time without tenure-track status (Anderson 2002, Baldwin and Chronister 2001, Conley et al. 2002). Growing student enrollments faced by academic institutions during tight financial times, and growing differentials between the salaries of part-time and full-time non-tenure-track faculty on the one hand, and tenured and tenure-track faculty on the other hand, are among the explanations given for these trends. However, surprisingly, there have been few econometric studies that seek to test whether ...

Financial Forces And The Future Of American Higher Education, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Michael J. Rizzo

Articles and Chapters

Recent shifts in state funding are altering the most basic realities of American higher education, from student access to faculty research.

Review Of The Book Shakespeare, Einstein, And The Bottom Line: The Marketing Of Higher Education, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Articles and Chapters

[Excerpt] Befitting a former journalist, Kirp's book is extraordinarily well-written; once one picks it up it is hard to put down. Some economists may be put off by a book that contains no equations, tables, figures or regression results. Such an attitude, however, would be misguided and any academic economist interested in better understanding how market forces are reshaping higher education should read Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line.

The Underrepresentation Of Minority Faculty In Higher Education: Panel Discussion, John Brooks Slaughter, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Eric Hanushek

Articles and Chapters

[Excerpt] The 3 July 2002 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education described the matter we are discussing today in these words: "Taken together. African-Americans and persons of Hispanic origin represent only 8 percent of full-time faculty nation-wide, and while 5 percent are African-American, half of them work at historically black institutions. The proportion of black faculty members at white institutions is 2.3 percent, virtually the same as it was 20 years ago."

We are privileged to have the opportunity to explore this issue from two different perspectives. The first contends that unless major changes occur, the number of ...

Prospects In The Academic Labor Market For Economists, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Articles and Chapters

[Excerpt] American colleges and universities are increasingly substituting nontenure track full-time and part-time faculty for full-time tenured and tenure track faculty. Moreover, institutions of public higher education, where almost two-thirds of the full-time faculty members at four-year institutions are employed, are under severe financial pressure. The share of state budgets devoted to public higher education is declining. The salaries of economics department faculty members at public higher education institutions have fallen substantially relative to the salaries of their counterparts at private higher education institutions, and it is becoming increasingly difficult for the publics to compete for top faculty in economics ...

Collective Bargaining In American Higher Education, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Daniel B. Klaff, Adam T. Kezbom, Matthew P. Nagowski

Articles and Chapters

[Excerpt] No discussion of governance in higher education would be complete without a consideration of the role of collective bargaining. Historically, most researchers interested in the subject have directed their attention to the unionization of faculty members. Given several recent decisions by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that leave open the possibility that unionization of faculty in private colleges and universities may increase in the future, we discuss collective bargaining for faculty in the first section (Leatherman 2000, A16).

Recently, however, attention has been also directed at the unionization of two other groups in the higher education workforce. Activists ...

Conclusion: Looking To The Future, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Articles and Chapters

[Excerpt] A number of important themes emerge from the chapters in Governing Academia. First, decentralization gives individual units—be they university campuses within a state system, colleges within a university, or departments within a college—an incentive to act in their own best interests, but less of an incentive to work toward the common good. As Heller points out, at the level of a state system, decentralization of control may lead to wasteful overlap between campuses. As Wilson shows, decentralized budgeting in the form of responsibility center management models may cause units not to maximize the quality of the education ...

Resident And Nonresident Tuition And Enrollment At Flagship State Universities, Michael J. Rizzo, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Articles and Chapters

[Excerpt] How tuition levels, or the availability of grant or loan aid, influence access are empirical questions that we will not address in this chapter. Rather, we will analyze how tuition and enrollment strategies at institutions react to changes in federal and state need-based student aid and to state appropriations to public higher education institutions. The former increases student mobility by expanding their choice set, while the latter does not travel with the student.

A Brief Guide To The Aaup Salary Data, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Articles and Chapters

[Excerpt] The AAUP data not only document faculty salary levels, but may also play a role in determining future levels. They represent average data for all full-time faculty members at the university, excluding faculty in medical colleges and health sciences. Thus, they can not be used to compare salaries within a discipline across institutions. They have long been used, however, by faculty on budget or finance committees to inform discussions with central administrators regarding the parameters of the next year’s budget (e.g. tuition increases, faculty salary increases, and endowment payout rates). Often, the faculty and administration will agree ...