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

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

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

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.

The Functional and Molecular Effects of Doxycycline Treatment on Borrelia burgdorferi Phenotype

Recent studies have shown that Borrelia burgdorferi can form antibiotic-tolerant persisters in the presence of microbiostatic drugs such as doxycycline. Precisely how this occurs is yet unknown. Our goal was to examine gene transcription by B. burgdorferi following doxycycline treatment in an effort to identify both persister-associated genes and possible targets for antimicrobial intervention. To do so, we performed next-generation RNA sequencing on doxycycline-treated spirochetes and treated spirochetes following regrowth, comparing them to untreated B. burgdorferi. A number of genes were perturbed and most of those which were statistically significant were down-regulated in the treated versus the untreated or treated/re-grown. Genes upregulated in the treated B. burgdorferi included a number of Erp genes and rplU, a 50S ribosomal protein. Among those genes associated with post-treatment regrowth were bba74 (Oms28), bba03, several peptide ABC transporters, ospA, ospB, ospC, dbpA and bba62. Studies are underway to determine if these same genes are perturbed in B. burgdorferi treated with doxycycline in a host environment

The Determinants of an Institution’s Transfer Student Enrollment

[Excerpt] Students transferring between institutions of higher learning are an important part of the higher education system. Recent work estimates, using a sample of students who began postsecondary education in the fall of 1989, that approximately one in three students transfer to another institution within 5 years (McCormick and Carroll, 1997). Despite the importance of the transfer route in higher education, very little is known about why four-year institutions enroll transfer students and which institutional characteristics are associated with a large transfer student share. This lack of knowledge is troubling for three reasons. First, this knowledge is required to predict transfer students’ access to certain institutions, which in turn helps determine the potential benefit of the transfer route for a student. Second, a better understanding of the determinants of transfer enrollment provides insights into general differences in enrollment policies across institutions and over time. One would expect differences in enrollment management between public and private institutions, between research universities and liberal arts colleges, and between selective and non-selective institutions. In addition, one might expect overall enrollments as well as differences across institutional types to change over time as tuition levels and other factors vary. The final reason why it is important to understand the determinants of an institution’s transfer enrollment share is that such knowledge provides insights into the degree to which institutions of higher learning profit from the characteristics of transfers. As discussed in the next section of this paper, transfer students can potentially benefit institutions in numerous ways such as reducing the inefficiencies created by high attrition rates or departmental enrollment imbalances. These productivity gains are important to both individual institutions and state systems of higher education with the latter entities especially able to realize these benefits because they can partially control the supply of transfer students.cheri_wp20.pdf: 533 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020