Who's Playing College Sports: Money, Race and Gender

This research is the most accurate description of college sports' participation patterns to date, shows that both men's and women's sports participation have increased over the past 25 years. It examines factors, including Title IX and athletic expenditure growth, impacting today's college sports participation trends, which vary widely by sport. Changes in high school sports participation, rising health care costs, increased numbers of international students, and college recruitment are explored, as well as the implication of these participation trends on college sports' diversity

Who's Playing College Sports: Trends in Participation

This study provides the most accurate and comprehensive examination of participation trends to date. We analyze data from almost every higher education institution in the country and utilize data and methods that are free of the shortcomings present in previous research on this subject. A 10-year NCAA sample containing 738 NCAA colleges and universities is examined over the 1995-96 to 2004-05 period. In addition, a complete four-year sample containing 1,895 higher education institutions is examined over the 2001-02 to 2004-05 period

Do Expenditures for Student Support Services Lead to Demonstrable Gains in Student Achievement?

Wood, Allemand, Anderson, and Cheslock present a brief overview and analysis of the article, Relationship between types of school district expenditures and student performance, originally published in Applied Economics Letters. The authors present a summary of the key components of the article including the introduction, method and results of the study. They offer an additional analysis of implications for future practice, including a discussion of legislation and the conflicting evidence that school counseling and support services benefit students in academic and social competencies, as well as evidence that the cost seems to outweigh the benefits

Gender Equity in Intercollegiate Athletics: Determinants of Title IX Compliance

Using new data on intercollegiate athletes, this article shows that recent improvement in Title IX compliance among NCAA Division I institutions was previously overestimated, and provides the first estimates of compliance in Divisions II and III. In addition, regression analyses investigate how institutional characteristics relate to the extent of non-compliance

Paying our Presidents: What do Trustees Value?

[Excerpt] Our study makes use of data from a panel of over 400 private colleges and universities on the salaries and benefits paid to their presidents. These data are reported annually to the Internal Revenue Service on Form 990 by the institutions. The data have been collected by, and reported in, the Chronicle of Higher Education for academic years 1992-93 through 1997-98.7 We use these data through 1996-97 and merge them with data from a number of other sources including the American Association of University Professors, the American Council on Education, Who’s Who in America, the National Association of College and University Business Officers, the Council on Aid to Education, and the National Science Foundation’s CASPAR system. This permits us to estimate salary and compensation level and change equations. The plan of our paper is as follows. We begin by providing some descriptive statistics on the compensation and mobility of American private college and university presidents, as well as on their personal characteristics. The next section estimates a model of the determinants of presidents’ salary and compensation levels. We then exploit the longitudinal nature of our data and present analyses of presidents’ salary and compensation changes. A brief concluding section summarizes our finding

Assessing Mental Health Literacy of First- and Third-Year Medical Students : Knowledge and Beliefs About Mental Disorders

Mental health literacy is the knowledge and beliefs about mental disorders that influence their identification, treatment, and prevention. It is highly pertinent for the primary care physician to possess appropriate mental health literacy, because it is in that sector that the majority of individuals first seek treatment. As many as 90% of individuals who experience symptoms of a mental disorder are first seen by their primary care physician. However, general practitioners often do not detect or diagnose the presence of a mental disorder, and as many as 50% of these disorders remain unidentified and untreated. This study explored the mental health literacy of first-year and third-year medical students to assess their knowledge and beliefs about mental disorders. Medical students were required to read vignettes describing an individual who was experiencing symptoms of stress or a mental disorder, and to indicate a diagnosis. It was hypothesized that: a) third-year medical students would have a significantly greater number of accurate diagnoses; b) the male-gendered vignettes would be significantly underdiagnosed by first-year-medical students; c) the female-gendered vignette describing stress would be significantly overdiagnosed as a mental disorder by first-verses third-year medical students; and d) third-year medical students would report significantly less mental health stigma. Results of this study found evidence that third-year medical students were better able to accurately diagnose a mental disorder as compared to first-year medical students after reading a vignette that described an individual experiencing symptoms of a mental disorder. The male-gendered vignettes were not significantly underdiagnosed by first-verses third-year medical students, and the female-gendered vignette depicting stress was not significantly overdiagnosed as a mental disorder by first-verses third-year medical students. Third-year medical students overdiagnosed the female-gendered stress vignette, while first-year medical students underdiagnosed the female-gendered generalized anxiety disorder vignette. The use of vignettes that describe individuals with symptoms of mental disorders appears to be a valid and reliable method of assessing mental health literacy. In addition, agreements and statistically significant differences are reported regarding prognosis, stigma, and the helpfulness of various interventions. Limitations and implications for future research are discussed

A study of the visual status of Washington Indians

A study of the visual status of Washington Indian

Visual profile of a rural elementary school poulation

Three hundred twenty one children in the 4111 through 8\u2711 grades were subjected to a comprehensive vision screening. The screening incorporated traditional methods such as visual acuity testing, and additional tests of binocular vision skills, eye movement and visual-perception. It was anticipated that this screening battery would identify more children with a visual deficit than would a screening with Snellen acuity testing alone. The results confirmed this, with more students failing the perceptual and eye movement aspects of testing than any other. Perceptual and eye movement testing may be a method of identifying more children with potentially troublesome deficits in these areas in the context of a school vision screening regimen

Gender Equity in Intercollegiate Athletics: Determinants of Title IX Compliance

[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 example, the female share of college athletes rose to 42% in 2001/02 from only 15% in 1972 (U.S. Department of Education, 1997, 2003). Despite this progress, gender equity is far from complete. Estimates from our data show that at the average institution in 2001/02, women comprised 55% of all students but only 42% of the varsity athletes. Our research describes the level of noncompliance with Title IX, as measured by the proportionality gap, between 1995/96 and 2001/02, and then investigates why some institutions perform better than others do on this measure of gender equity. One important contribution of this article is the introduction of a new data set developed by the authors that includes information on athletic offerings and other institutional characteristics for the 1995/96 and 2001/02 academic years. Our data represent a substantial improvement over previous data because we include institutions in Divisions I, II, and III and adjust for changes in how institutions report athletic participation over the period; previous research focused solely on Division I institutions and did not adjust for reporting differences. We show that these data differences are important: Reliance on unadjusted data from Division I institutions results in large overestimates of the improvement in compliance at NCAA institutions during the late 1990s. Our data also include a rich set of explanatory variables that we use in regression analyses to explain the extent of institutional noncompliance. We examine the determinants of the proportionality gap by estimating OLS cross-section regressions (with and without conference fixed effects) at two points in time (1995/96 and 2001/02) and first-difference regressions for changes over the period

Paying our Presidents: What do Trustees Value?

We use panel data on the salaries and benefits of private university and college presidents for the 1992-93 to 1996-97 period to try to infer the factors that the trustees of these institutions value. Salary level equations suggest that the salary and compensation of the presidents are positively associated with the enrollment and endowment levels of their institutions and the test scores of their entering students. Salary and compensation change equations estimated for the presidents who remained in their positions for four years provide only weak evidence that presidents' pay increases are related to their fund raising success and no evidence that they get rewarded for their institutions' freshmen test scores increasing.