Financial Forces and the Future of American Higher Education

Recent shifts in state funding are altering the most basic realities of American higher education, from student access to faculty research

The 1995 NRC Ratings of Doctoral Programs: A Hedonic Model

We describe how one can use multivariate regression models and data collected by the National Research Council as part of its recent ranking of doctoral programs (Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States: Continuity and Change) to analyze how measures of program size, faculty seniority, faculty research productivity, and faculty productivity in producing doctoral degrees influence subjective ratings of doctoral programs in 35 academic fields. Using data for one of the fields, economics, we illustrate how university administrators can use the models to compute the impact of changing the number of faculty positions they allocate to the field on the ranking of their programs. Finally, we illustrate how administrators can decompose the differences between a department\u27s rating and the ratings of a group of higher ranked departments in the field into difference due to faculty size, faculty seniority, faculty research productivity, and faculty productivity in producing doctoral students. This decomposition suggests the types of questions that a department and a university should be addressing if they are serious about wanting to improve the department\u27s ranking

Resident and Nonresident Tuition and Enrollment at Flagship State Universities

[Excerpt] How tuition levels, or the availability of grant or loan aid, influence access are empirical questions that we will not address in this chapter. Rather, we will analyze how tuition and enrollment strategies at institutions react to changes in federal and state need-based student aid and to state appropriations to public higher education institutions. The former increases student mobility by expanding their choice set, while the latter does not travel with the student

Did Teachers’ Race and Verbal Ability Matter in the 1960’s? Coleman Revisited

Our paper reanalyzes data from the classic 1966 study Equality of Educational Opportunity, or Coleman Report. It addresses whether teacher characteristics, including race and verbal ability, influenced synthetic gain scores of students (mean test scores of upper grade students in a school minus mean test scores of lower grade students in a school), in the context of an econometric model that allows for the possibility that teacher characteristics in a school are endogenously determined. We find that verbal aptitude scores of teachers influenced synthetic gain scores for both black and white students. Verbal aptitude mattered as much for black teachers as it did for white teachers. Finally, holding teacher characteristics other than race constant, black teachers were associated with higher gain scores for black high school students, but lower gain scores for white elementary and secondary students. Because these findings are for American schools in the mid-1960\u27s, they do not directly apply to our contemporary experience. However, they do raise issues that should be addressed in discussions of hiring policies in American education

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

Resident and Nonresident Tuition and Enrollment at Flagship State Universities

We address the determinants of resident and nonresident tuition and enrollment at public universities. A key explanatory variable is the share of out-of-state students enrolled under reciprocity agreements. We find that public universities use out-of-state enrollments primarily to augment student quality, not to make up for losses in state appropriations.In the main out-of-state enrollment levels are relatively insensitive to out-of-state tuition levels charged by institutions. Finally, we find no evidence that public universities increase their in-state or out-of-state tuition levels in response to increased federal or state financial aid for students.

Start-Up Costs in American Research Universities

Our report briefly summarizes findings from the 2002 Cornell Higher Education Research Institute survey of start-up costs at the over 220 universities classified as Research and Doctoral universities by the Carnegie Foundation in 1994. It reports the mean start-up cost packages across institutions for new assistant professors and senior faculty, broken down by institutional type (public/private), Carnegie classification and field (biology, chemistry, engineering, physics and astronomy) and also discuses the sources of funding for start-up costs

Do Teachers’ Race, Gender, and Ethnicity Matter? Evidence From the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988

Using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS), the authors find that the match between teachers\u27 race, gender, and ethnicity and those of their students had little association with how much the students learned, but in several instances it seems to have been a significant determinant of teachers\u27 subjective evaluations of their students. For example, test scores of white female students in mathematics and science did not increase more rapidly when the teacher was a white woman than when the teacher was a white man, but white female teachers evaluated their white female students more highly than did white male teachers

The Class Size Controversy

[Excerpt] When we ask whether class size matters for achievement, it is essential to ask also, how class size matters. This is important for three reasons. First, if we can observe not only achievement differences, but also the mechanisms through which the differences are produced, this will increase our confidence that the differences are real, and not an artifact of some unmeasured or inadequately controlled condition. Second, the effects of class size may vary in different circumstances, and identifying how class size affects achievement will help us to understand why the effects of class size are variable. Third, the potential benefits of class size reduction may be greater than what we observe. For example, suppose class size reductions aid achievement, but only when teachers modify instructional practices to take advantage of the smaller classes. If a few teachers make such modifications, but most do not, then understanding how class size affects achievement in some cases will help reveal its potential effects, even if the potential is generally unrealized