Within State Transitions From 2-Year to 4-Year Public Institutions

[Excerpt] Within many large states there are multiple 2-year and 4-year institutions. In 1998-99, only 19 states had less than 15 public 2-year institutions. Of the 31 states with 15 or more public 2-year institutions, only 3 had 5 or fewer public 4-year institutions. State policymakers and system administrators should want to know how well each 2-year public institution is doing in preparing those of its students who transfer to public 4-year institutions in the state to successfully complete 4-year college study. Similarly, they should want to know how successful each 4-year college in the state is in graduating those students from 2-year colleges that transfer to it. This information could then be used either in summative evaluations that relate to resource allocation decisions, or more preferably, in formative evaluations in which knowledge of the best practices of the most successful institutions are transmitted to their sister institutions in the state. That is, the information could be used to help improve the performance of a state’s public higher education system. Our paper uses data provided to us by the Office of Institutional Research of the State University of New York (SUNY) to illustrate a methodological approach that can be used to address these issues. While the methodology we develop is applied to data from the SUNY system, the paper’s main purpose is to illustrate the methodology because we the approach can be usefully employed in any state that has multiple public 2-year and 4-year institutions. In the next section, we describe the SUNY system, discuss the data to which we have been granted access and sketch out our methodological approach. Empirical findings are provided in the following three sections and the sensitivity of our finding to the specific model estimated and sample of data used are examined. Section VI presents a discussion of the some of the conceptual and statistical limitations of our approach and the types of data that, if available, would improve the analyses

What a Difference a Decade Makes: Growing Wealth Inequality Among Ivy League Institutions

[Excerpt] The eight Ivy League institutions – Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton and Yale - are among our nations most selective undergraduate institutions. They also are among its wealthiest. They compete against each other for top faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, as well as on intercollegiate athletic fields. However, this competition has never taken place on a level “playing field” because of the vast differences in endowment resources that have always existed across the institutions. The prolonged stock market expansion during the 1990s magnified these differences in ways that many still do not fully comprehend

Human Resource Practices, Knowledge-Creation Capability And Performance In High Technology Firms

This study examines the relationship among key HR practices (i.e., effective acquisition, employee-development, commitment-building, and networking practices), three dimensions of knowledge-creation capability (human capital, employee motivation, and information combination and exchange), and firm performance. Results from a sample of 78 high technology firms showed that the three dimensions of knowledge creation interact to positively affect sales growth. Further, the HR practices were found to affect sales growth through their affect on the dimensions of knowledge-creation capability

Why Do School District Budget Referenda Fail?

[Excerpt] Public elementary and secondary education is financed in many states at least partially at the local level and school district budgets in many states are determined by voter referenda. To date, however, there have been no studies that sought to explain why the proportion of school district budget proposals in a state that are approved by voters in referenda varies over time. Similarly no research has used panel data on school districts to test whether budget referenda failures are concentrated in a small number of school districts within a state and whether the failure of a budget referendum in a school district in one year influences the likelihood that voters in the district subsequently defeat a budget referendum in the next year. Our paper uses data from school budget votes in New York State to answer these questions

Incorporation of Functionalized Polyhedral Oligomeric Silsesquioxane Nanomaterials as Reinforcing Agents for Impact Ice Mitigating Coatings

In-flight, aircraft are exposed to a wide range of environments. One commonly exposed environment are clouds containing super-cooled water droplets. These water drop- lets exist in a metastable state below the freezing point of water, in the range of 0 to -20C. As the vehicle impacts the droplets, latent heat is released and within milliseconds the droplets convert to ice. This process is referred to as impact icing or in-flight icing.1 Impact icing is a major concern for aircraft since it can lead to degraded aerodynamic performance and, if left un- treated, can lead to loss of the vehicle. Active approaches (i.e., pneumatic boots, heated air ducts) typically utilized in mitigating in-flight ice accretion significantly increases vehicle weight and cannot be applied to all aircraft.1-3 A passive approach based on coatings is desired, but durability issues are a concern, especially on the wing leading edge.3 Nanomaterials have been shown to afford significant improvement in coating and composite physical properties at low loading levels.4 In this study, Polyhedral Oligomeric Silsesquioxane (POSS) nanomaterials have been shown to increase coating durability. Also, with wide variety of functionalities present on the arm structure, POSS nanomaterials have been shown to readily alter coating surface chemistry to mitigate impact ice adhesion from -16 to -8C in a simulated in-flight icing environment

Elastic response of a nematic liquid crystal to an immersed nanowire

We study the immersion of a ferromagnetic nanowire within a nematic liquid crystal using a lattice Boltzmann algorithm to solve the full three-dimensional equations of hydrodynamics. We present an algorithm for including a moving boundary, to simulate a nanowire, in a lattice Boltzmann simulation. The nematic imposes a torque on a wire that increases linearly with the angle between the wire and the equilibrium direction of the director field. By rotation of these nanowires, one can determine the elastic constants of the nematic.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure

The Sources and Uses of Annual Giving at Private Research Universities

Private research universities differ in the shares of their annual giving coming from different sources (alumni, other individuals, foundations, corporations) and the shares of their annual giving applied to different uses (current operations, buildings and equipment, enhancing their endowments). After providing background data on the aggregate variation in these shares over time and their interuniversity variation at a point in time, our econometric analyses use data from a panel of research universities that span a 30-year period to provide explanations for these differences. These differences are seen to depend upon institutional characteristics, macroeconomic variables and tax parameters. One key finding is that richer institutions, as measured by endowment per student, devote a larger share of their annual giving to further building their endowments. This contributes to the increasing dispersion of wealth across private research universities.

Apolipoproteins for Cardiovascular Risk Assessment

Clinical Question: Is measurement of apolipoproteins better than traditional lipid measurements for predicting cardiovascular risk? Evidence-Based Answer: Measurement of apolipoprotein B and apolipoprotein A-I is no better than traditional lipid measurements and should not be used to predict cardiovascular risk. (Strength of Recommendation: B, based on meta-analyses with conflicting results.) Apolipoprotein B and non-high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) predict cardiovascular risk slightly better than low-density lipoprotein cholesterol. Elevated levels of apolipoprotein A-I predict a lower risk of cardiovascular events except stroke, but not as well as elevated HDL-C levels