Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It . . . : Taking Law School Mission Statements Seriously

Learning about the process and the results of mission definition in law schools has made palpable the tension between clarity and inflexibility, candor and marketing concerns, and the specificity that fosters accountability as opposed to the generality that embraces a vague multitude of approaches to the law school endeavor. Building on the strong endorsement of the use of mission statements in the original Best Practices for Legal Education, we present some “Best Practices” for both the development and the content of law school mission statements. We hope that this piece hastens further conversation and commentary that will foster a richer and more mindful perspective on this necessary--and potentially transformative--task of legal educators

The Review - Fall 2001

IN THIS ISSUE 1 - Message From The Dean 2 - A Special Welcome for Alumni Babies 2 - A Very Special Offer for Our Alumni 3 - Farewell to Joann Ludwig 4 - The Admissions-Alumni Partnership 5 - JAVA is Brewing at Jefferson! 6 - What A Year! 8 - Alumni Update 10 - Alumni News Form 11 - Visiting Scholar 2001: A Nurse Alumna Sets the Agenda 12 - Michael Hartman Elected New CHP Alumni President 13 - Commencement 200

Student Placement in Egyptian Colleges

We study students placement in Egyptian colleges under the current demand/supply placement mechanism implemented in Egypt (e-mechanism). We show that the e-mechanism is not Pareto efficient nor strategy proof and, moreover, it can not be improved to accommodate Pareto efficiency nor strategy proofness. The final conclusion is that it is better, from an efficiency point of view, to adopt a matching algorithm, like the Gale-Shapley mechanism, in students placement.Student placement, Gale-Shapley mechanism, e-mechanism, Egypt

College admissions with stable score-limits

A common feature of the Hungarian, Irish, Spanish and Turkish higher education admission systems is that the students apply for programmes and they are ranked according to their scores. Students who apply for a programme with the same score are in a tie. Ties are broken by lottery in Ireland, by objective factors in Turkey (such as date of birth) and other precisely defined rules in Spain. In Hungary, however, an equal treatment policy is used, students applying for a programme with the same score are all accepted or rejected together. In such a situation there is only one question to decide, whether or not to admit the last group of applicants with the same score who are at the boundary of the quota. Both concepts can be described in terms of stable score-limits. The strict rejection of the last group with whom a quota would be violated corresponds to the concept of H-stable (i.e. higher-stable) score-limits that is currently used in Hungary. We call the other solutions based on the less strict admission policy as L-stable (i.e. lower-stable) score-limits. We show that the natural extensions of the Gale-Shapley algorithms produce stable score-limits, moreover, the applicant-oriented versions result in the lowest score-limits (thus optimal for students) and the college-oriented versions result in the highest score-limits with regard to each concept. When comparing the applicant-optimal H-stable and L-stable score-limits we prove that the former limits are always higher for every college. Furthermore, these two solutions provide upper and lower bounds for any solution arising from a tie-breaking strategy. Finally we show that both the H-stable and the L-stable applicant-proposing scorelimit algorithms are manipulable

Color-Blind Affirmative Action

This paper presents a conceptual framework for understanding the consequences of the widespread adoption of race-neutral alternatives' to conventional racial affirmative action policies in college admissions. A simple model of applicant competition with endogenous effort is utilized to show that, in comparison to color-conscious affirmative action, these color-blind alternatives can significantly lower the efficiency of the student selection process in equilibrium. We examine data on matriculates at several selective colleges and universities to estimate the magnitudes involved. It is shown that the short-run efficiency losses of implementing color-blind affirmative action (in our sample) are four to five times as high as color-conscious affirmative action.

The Review - Fall 2001

IN THIS ISSUE 1 - Message From The Dean 2 - A Special Welcome for Alumni Babies 2 - A Very Special Offer for Our Alumni 3 - Farewell to Joann Ludwig 4 - The Admissions-Alumni Partnership 5 - JAVA is Brewing at Jefferson! 6 - What A Year! 8 - Alumni Update 10 - Alumni News Form 11 - Visiting Scholar 2001: A Nurse Alumna Sets the Agenda 12 - Michael Hartman Elected New CHP Alumni President 13 - Commencement 200

Returning to Learning: Adults' Success in College Is Key to America's Future

Provides an overview of research on adult learners' characteristics, risk factors, and needs at four-year institutions and in for-credit and non-credit courses, and what changes institutions and governments can implement to help adult students succeed

Equilibrium Tuition, Applications, Admissions and Enrollment in the College Market

I develop and estimate a structural equilibrium model of the college market. Students, having heterogeneous abilities and preferences, make college application decisions, subject to uncertainty and application costs. Colleges, observing only noisy measures of student ability, choose tuition and admissions policies to compete for more able students. Tuition, applications, admissions and enrollment are joint outcomes from a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium. I estimate the structural parameters of the model using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, via a three-step procedure to deal with potential multiple equilibria. In counterfactual experiments, I use the model first to examine the extent to which college enrollment can be increased by expanding the supply of colleges, and then to assess the importance of various measures of student ability.College market, tuition, applications, admissions, enrollment, discrete choice, market equilibrium, multiple equilibria, estimation

Building a Birth-to-College Model: Professional Learning Communities

The newest in a planned series of case studies on building a birth-to-college model of education released by the University of Chicago Urban Education Institute (UEI) and the Ounce of Prevention Fund this case study outlines how to create professional learning communities (PLCs) of teachers, administrators and family support staff spanning the early childhood to K-12 spectrum. The intent of the PLCs is to create environments where practitioners take the lead in collaboratively studying and piloting effective, developmentally informed practices that prepare children for college, beginning at birth.This teaching case study is intended to illustrate the evolutionary process of PLC development by UEI and the Ounce and inform the work of others interested in building similar birth-to-college systems to benefit children and families. It is based on interviews of 25 participants in the Birth-to-College Partnership, observations of PLC and other Birth to-College Partnership meetings over the six-month period between January 2012 and June 2012, and a review of Birth-to-College meeting notes and other documents dating back to June 2010