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

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

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

How College Enrollment Strategies Affect Student Labor Market Success

[Excerpt] This paper analyzes how the composition of an institution’s student body affects the performance of that institution’s students. In particular, we investigate how the average student quality and the dispersion in student quality within the student body affects the future earnings of individual students. We begin in section II by examining the two primary reasons why one’s fellow students would affect future labor market success: peer effects and employer screening. Peer effects are important because one’s peers can augment or detract from human capital accumulation through numerous types of interactions. The literature examining these potential effects is growing, and we summarize the work and relate the findings to our specific question. The second reason, employer screening, captures the role of one’s fellow students in shaping the beliefs of employers about the quality of students at the institution. These beliefs may affect employers’ actions in two manners. First, the level of student quality may affect the intensity by which employers recruit at that institution. Second, the dispersion in student quality may affect the degree to which employers screen by ability when interviewing the institution’s students. We formalize this discussion of employer behavior with a screening model. The analyses in Section II generate several predictions, and we turn next to tests of their validity. After reviewing past research on the topic in Section III, we use the 1982 cohort of the High School and Beyond survey in Section IV to provide additional evidence. Our findings are consistent with much of the previous literature. We find that the level of student quality at an institution is an important determinant of earnings; a 100 point increase in the median SAT is related to a 3 percent increase in a student’s annual earnings. In addition, students with lower SAT scores appear to receive the highest premium from attending an institution with a high median SAT. We do not find that the range in ability of one’s peers is a strong predictor of earnings. While some evidence suggests that that those at the bottom of the institution’s ability distribution suffer a wage penalty from an increased spread in student ability, the relationship is fairly weak and not statistically significant.cheri_wp19.pdf: 248 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020