Building Blocks: Project Based Learning in Human Development Research

Collaborative human development (HD) research projects can provide numerous benefits for students and faculty mentors. HD research opportunities for students are often limited to existing funded projects that may not meet individual student interests. Creating HD research projects that incorporate both student and faculty interests is mutually beneficial but poses unique challenges. HD research often requires complex observational methods, specific content knowledge, and interpersonal skills to work with families and children. Project-based learning (PBL) can provide a low-cost framework for students and faculty to align interests while helping students develop proficiency in human development research. PBL structures learning through the process of finding solutions to complicated questions (Jones, Rasmussen, & Moffitt, 1997). PBL is often used in engineering, business, and teacher training, but rarely in educating developmental researchers. This experience provides an active, \u27first hand feel\u27 to project development and illustrates the effectiveness of the PBL model in developing human development research. This apprenticeship model case study offers two rounds of qualitative, descriptive data to illustrate the experiences of an undergraduate student, several graduate students, and faculty involvement in a group-based PBL research project. Students and the faculty mentor answered questions regarding the challenges and benefits of participating in a PBL research project and the use of a PBL project for mentoring graduate students. Results from this case study indicate that PBL participation can be a beneficial academic experience. Specifically, students learned about the logistics and details of planning a research project from the beginning while learning to collaborate with and mentor each other. Results suggest that students and faculty within the HD field can collaborate in meaningful ways that provide mutual benefit and bring diverse strengths to a project that meets multiple learning, teaching, research, and service goals

What’s The Future of Public Higher Education? A Review Essay on \u3ci\u3ePublic No More: A New Path to Excellence for America’s Public Universities\u3c/i\u3e

[Excerpt] Every year I come across a few books or papers that I wish that I had written. Public No More: A New Path to Excellence for America’s Public Universities clearly is one of them. Coauthored by Gary Fethke and Andrew Policano (henceforth F&P), two longtime public business school deans (one of whom was also acting president of the University of Iowa), who are both very serious scholars with long publication records, Public No More paints a picture of a future for public research universities that is very different than what many people will want to see. And although its message is that the financial and governance models under which public research universities have operated under have broken down and that new models are required, I will argue at the end of this piece that private higher research universities face many of the same issues as their public counterparts, so their message is relevant to private research universities as well. While I do not always agree with F&P’s prescriptions, this is a book that deserves to be widely read by all people concerned with the future of higher education in the United States. In what follows, I outline the arguments found in Public No More interjecting my comments and concerns as I go along. As an economist specializing for many years in the economics of higher education, a former Cornell vice president and trustee, and most recently a member of the board of trustee of the 64 campus State University of New York (SUNY) system, I view higher education from a number of different perspectives and these will all be evident in this essay

Rethinking the Professoriate

[Excerpt] The American higher education system faces tremendous pressure to enhance access and graduation rates. In a period of increasing financial difficulties, how will our nation’s higher education institutions achieve these goals and how will they recruit faculty and staff their classes in the future? The answers to these questions, which are the focus of my paper, will likely vary across different types of higher education institutions and will reflect the nature of the classes that they offer and the types of students that they educate

Independent Colleges and Universities in a Time of Transition

[Excerpt] I am going to discuss the stresses that the American higher education system is now under, the changes that we have seen in American higher education over the last three decades - many which predate the great recession - and how CIC members have responded, and might respond in the future, to these changes. A message that I hope you will take away is that I believe you have a unique advantage relative to your public sector counterparts because of the difference in the governance structures and financial models under which you operate. I will conclude by speculating a bit about what the future will hold for all of us

Do Expenditures Other Than Instructional Expenditures Affect Graduation and Persistence Rates in American Higher Education

[Excerpt] Rates of tuition increases in both private and public higher education that continually exceed inflation, coupled with the fact that the United States no longer leads the world in terms of the fraction of our young adults who have college degrees, have focused attention on why costs keep increasing in higher education and what categories of higher education expenditures have been growing the most rapidly. In a series of publications, the Delta Cost Project has shown that during the last two decades median instructional spending per full-time equivalent (FTE) student in both public and private 4-year colleges and universities in the United States grew at a slower rate than median expenditures per FTE student in many other categories of expenditures (research, public service, academic support, student services, and scholarships and fellowships).1 Similarly, the Center for College Affordability and Productivity reports that during the same time period, managerial and support/service staff at colleges and universities grew relative to faculty. Do such changes reflect increased inefficiency and waste or do some non instructional categories of employees and expenditures contribute directly to the educational mission of American colleges and universities? In this paper, we use institutional level panel data and an educational production function approach to estimate whether various non instructional categories of expenditures directly influence graduation and persistence rates of undergraduate students in American colleges and universities. We find, not surprisingly, that the answer is several of these expenditure categories do influence students’ educational outcome, but that the extent that they matter varies with the socioeconomic backgrounds and the average test scores of the students attending the institutions

The Growing Imbalance: Recent Trends in U.S. Postsecondary Education Finance

Compares trends at public, private, and research institutions in enrollment, revenues, and spending as well as their effect on bottom lines; analyzes widening disparities; and considers implications for improving the affordability of higher education

Studying Ourselves: The Academic Labor Market

[Excerpt] The study of academic labor markets by economists goes back at least to Adam Smith’s suggestion in The Wealth of Nations that a professor’s compensation be tied to the number of students that enrolled in his classes. This paper focuses on three academic labor market issues that students at Cornell and I are currently addressing; the declining salaries of faculty employed at public colleges and universities relative to the salaries of their counterparts employed at private higher education institutions, the growing dispersion of average faculty salaries across academic institutions within both the public and private sectors, and the impacts of the growing importance and costs of science on the academic labor market and universities

\u3ci\u3eGoing Broke by Degree\u3c/i\u3e: A Review Essay

In this review, the author posits that Richard Vedder’s book Going Broke By Degree: Why College Costs Too Much, while providing a good diagnosis of the problems and issues facing public higher education, suffers from a heavily political bent which skews Vedder’s policy conclusions away from empirical evidence and toward ideology. The author’s essay attempts to clarify for the reader which of Vedder’s statements are based on philosophy and which are based on fact

The Economics of Tuition and Fees in American Higher Education

This paper provides an introduction to the economics of tuition and fees in American Higher Education. It summarizes data on undergraduate tuition and fee levels in public and private institutions, discusses the forms of financial assistance that students receive, and provides explanations for why tuition and fees for undergraduate students in both private and public higher education institutions in the United States have increased, on average, by 2 to 3.5 percentage points a year more than the rate of increase in consumer prices. Finally, it briefly addresses tuition and fees in graduate professional and doctoral programs in the United States