LESSONS FROM AN AMERICAN QUANDARY STRENTHENING SHARED GOVERNANCE IN TURBULENT TIMES

This article is about some American universities which faced with problems that should be solved by governance of the USA. Author tells about the following universities: The University of Wisconsin-Madison, The Pennsylvania State University, and The University of Virgini

The Contracting Market for Law School Admissions in the United States

This report summarizes the analysis of legal education market data, compiled by the American Bar Association and presented on the AccessLex website, by a research team from the University of Pennsylvania\u27s Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy (AHEAD). Robert Zemsky served as principal investigator and Richard Morgan as principal analyst. The research was conducted over two years and yielded two PowerPoint presentations to AccessLex\u27s annual research symposium

The Rain Man Cometh - Again

For colleges and universities October has traditionally been a tough month — growing darkness, impending rain and cold, the creeping realization that the football team won\u27t win that many games. Not so long ago, October was also the month of reckoning for higher education: On October 16, 1983, U.S. News and World Report published its first rankings of institutions. Under the soft-sell headline America\u27s Best Colleges and in the breathless prose of a Sunday supplement, U.S. News offered up a collegiate roster of who was in, who was out, who was hot, and who was not

The Rise and Fall of the Spellings Commission

The invitation arrived in late June 2005. The secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, was asking me to join her in Denver for a round-table discussion focusing on higher education. Nothing seemed right: There was no list of invited participants, no offer to cover travel costs, no indication really of intended purposes or likely outcomes. I had all but decided to decline, citing family and other responsibilities, when an e-mail message arrived from Jim Duderstadt, president emeritus of the University of Michigan, saying he hoped that I would join him for breakfast in Denver the morning of the round table. I bought my tickets that afternoon

Reinventing the Research University: An American perspective

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/89226/1/2003_Duderstadt_and_Zemsky.pd

Market Analysis for Law School Admissions

The numbers are truly astonishing. Between 2011 and 2015, total enrollments in the 200- plus United States law schools whose data are regularly tracked by the American Bar Association (ABA) decreased by more than 20 percent. The total number of “missing students” was just shy of 30,000, an amount which translates into the total enrollments of 38 average-sized law schools—24 private not-for-profit and 14 public. Almost equally astonishing, however, is the fact that so little actually changed. None of the 200-plus law schools that reported their enrollment data to the ABA closed. The 65-35 percentage split between private and public enrollments was maintained. While total net revenue from JD tuitions declined by more than $400 million dollars, or 13 percent, law school staffing levels also declined, but much less dramatically. There was some reduction in the market-prices some law schools charged (defined as average net tuition revenue per full-time JD student), but there were also increases particularly among top-tier law schools, many of which increased their total JD enrollments despite the overall contraction in the market. Those variances in price suggest that there might be considerable complexity behind the enrollment contraction and the price behavior it engendered—a complexity largely masked in the summary reports detailing a significantly smaller market for law school admissions after 2011. Drawing on our previous work for two major law schools, and our modeling of the price behavior across the market for collegiate undergraduate admissions, we set out to develop a set of statistical models capable of predicting the market-prices U.S. law schools were able to charge in 2015. The data for this analysis came from the ABA via the Access Group’s Center for Research and Policy Analysis website—complete enrollment, admissions, program, and staffing data for 171 law schools

Making Sense of a Looking Glass World

As the Walrus in Lewis Carroll\u27s knows, it is the sorting out that matters most. And in colleges and universities, just as in oysters, those of the largest size and most prestige will almost certainly insist on being grouped together, no matter what the consequences. Working with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation we have set for ourselves the task of doing just that—using data drawn from the U.S. Department of Education\u27s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) to sort American colleges and universities into recognizable clusters that or segments that facilitate the making of comparisons within groups of similar institutions. No less, we seek a set of indices or measures that document the performance of these institutions in terms of access and completions. And to accomplish this latter task, we seek a reasonable means of describing each institution\u27s undergraduate student body along four gauges of diversity: economic, race and ethnicity, age, and geography

Mentoring and Diversity

This paper studies the forces which determine how diversity at a firm evolves over time. We consider a dynamic model o a single firm with two levels of employees, the entry level and the upper level. In each period, the firm selects a subset of the entry-level workers for promotion to the upper level. The members of the entry-level worker pool vary in their initial ability as well as in their type,' where type could refer to gender or cultural background. Employees augment their initial ability by acquiring specific human capital in mentoring interactions with upper level employees. We assume that an entry-level worker receives more mentoring when a greater proportion of upper-level workers match the entry-level worker's type. In this model, it is optimal for the firm to consider type in addition to ability in making promotion decisions, so as to maximize the effectiveness of future mentoring. We derived conditions under which firms attain full diversity, as well as conditions under which there are multiple steady states, so that the level of diversity depends on the firm's initial conditions. With multiple steady states, temporary affirmative action policies can have a long-run impact on diversity levels.