This presentation will be based on the new contribution to the CSHE Research and Occasional Paper, and as part of the Center's Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Project available at: http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?s=1

A number of national studies point to a trend in which highly selective and elite private and public universities are becoming less accessible to lower-income students. This paper explores the divide between poor and rich students, comparing a group of selective institutions and their number and percentage of Pell Grant recipients, and offers an analysis of the high percentage of low-income undergraduate students within the University of California system - who they are, their academic performance and other experiences using data from the University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey and institutional data.

There have been few studies on the range of backgrounds and academic experiences of low-income students, or comparisons of their university lives with those of more wealthy students. Among the conclusions: The University of California has a relatively high number of low-income students when compared to a sample group of twenty-four other selective public and private universities and colleges, including the Ivy Leagues and a sub-group of other California institutions such as Stanford and the University of Southern California. Indeed, the UC campuses of Berkeley, Davis, and UCLA each have more Pell Grant students than all of the eight Ivy League institutions combined. One out of three lower-income students enrolled at UC have at least one parent with a college degree, indicating that these students are not all first-generation college students as is widely believed. Low-income students, and in particular Pell Grant recipients, at UC have only slightly lower GPAs than their more wealthy counterparts in both math, science and engineering, and in humanities and social science fields; have generally the same academic and social satisfaction levels; and are similar in their sense of belonging within a campus community. However, there are some marginal differences between campuses, with students being less satisfied at UC campuses where there are more affluent student bodies and where lower-income students have a smaller presence.

For more information on the SERU Project, see: http://cshe.berkeley.edu/research/seru/

Sponsored by Institute for the Study of Social Change and Center for Studies in Higher Education.

Some findings from the UC Experience Survey

Sponsored by Center for Studies in Higher Education and Institute for the Study of Social Change.

more information...

Strengthening Precollegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC) was a multi-site action research project organized by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The eleven participating California community colleges extended local programs, built on local strengths, and worked with the Carnegie team to learn from their experiences.

As part of the work, each campus created a faculty inquiry group. Faculty Inquiry is a form of faculty development where teachers work together to shape questions about student learning and then gather and analyze evidence to address those questions. The answers come back to the classroom in the form of new curricula, new assessments and new pedagogies, which in turn become subjects for further inquiry.

Professor Zhou is currently a Fulbright visiting scholar at Stanford University, directs a College Students Learning Survey in China, and is pursuing research on the evaluation of higher education in that nation's rapidly growing education system. He is also the Director of Humanities and Social Sciences and Executive Deputy Director of the Institute of Higher Education at Beijing Normal University.

Sponsored by Institute of East Asian Studies and Center for Studies in Higher Education.

Detailed planning for the new University of California School of Global Health has been underway for a year. This new school will be the University's first multi-campus school. Although UC has substantial experience with multi-campus research units, institutes and centers, it has very few multi-campus academic programs and no multi-campus schools. Ellen Switkes, Coordinator of Planning, will describe the initial impetus for this school and describe the plans to date. She will also describe some of the remaining problems, primarily complex administrative and budgetary issues, and would like to discuss possible solutions.

Ellen Switkes was appointed as coordinator of planning for the University of California School of Global Health in August, 2007 after a 27 year career as Assistant Vice President of Academic Advancement in the UC Office of the President. Her initial appointment at the University of California was as Assistant Professor of Chemistry at UC Santa Cruz. She has a degree in inorganic chemistry from MIT.

Doctoral education has not escaped globalization. For the first time, conditions exist for the emergence of an international system of doctoral education. This talk is based on the results of two NSF funded international workshops organized by the Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education (CIRGE) at the University of Washington in 2005 and 2007. It will be argued that globalization has brought a number of common trends to graduate education worldwide, “converging practices; ”and it also has different effects on different regions and the increasingly diverse graduate student population. Due to globalization, graduate education today has to fulfill a dual mission: that of building a nation’s infrastructure of professionals and scholars, and of educating domestic and international graduate students for participation in a global economy and an international scholarly community. This dual mission is often experienced as a tension. Globalization cannot be avoided but institutions of higher education can respond proactively in preparing its doctoral students adequately for times of globalization and an increasing national interest in the role of doctoral education for the knowledge economy. We need to educate our students to be able to define and solve societal problems both at home and abroad, collectively, in trans-, multi- and interdisciplinary and international groups. We need to operationalize the slogan: think globally and act locally in truly internationalizing our campuses at home.

Maresi Nerad is the founding director of the national Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education (CIRGE), Associate Dean of the Graduate School, and Associate Professor for Higher Education in the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Program College of Education, all at the University of Washington, Seattle. She received her doctorate in higher education from the University of California-Berkeley in 1988. From 1988 until 2001, Dr. Nerad directed research in the Graduate Division at the University of California-Berkeley and spent the six months in 2000 as Dean in Residence at the Council of Graduate Schools. In 2005 she was nominated for the Miegunyah Fellow by the University of Melbourne, Australia, and spent three months at the University of Australia.

She is the author or editor of four books on higher education: Towards a Global PhD? Changes in Doctoral Education Worldwide (2008,) The Academic Kitchen: a Social History of Gender Stratification at the University of California (1999), Graduate Education in the United States (1997), and Feministische Wissenschaft und Frauenstudium. (Feminist Research and Women's Studies in the U.S.) (1982).

John Douglass will discuss recent findings from a research project on tuition and fees trends in the US and EU with Ruth Keeling - CSHE Research Associate and Coordinator of the European Education Policy Network based at the University of Cambridge - and will offer for discussion an alternative tuition and fee model for the University of California.

Globally, fees and tuition are growing as an important source of income for most universities and with potentially significant influences on the market for students and the behavior of institutions. Thus far, however, there is no single source on the fee rates of comparative and often competitive research universities, nor information on how these funds are being used by institutions. Research on tuition pricing has also focused largely on Bachelor's degree programs, and not on the rapid changes in professional degrees. This paper offers a brief scan of pricing trends among a sample group of 24 public and private research universities in the US all with a wide array of graduate and professional programs, and a small sample group of EU universities. John Douglass and Ruth Keeling trace a pattern of convergence between not only US public and private institutions, but also EU universities (or at least an indicator that this is occurring). They theorize that pricing among major research universities is increasingly influenced by a sense of what the market will bear, and a convergence in pricing driven in part by the perception that price equals quality for consumers, and hence prestige. The focus in their paper is on pricing, and hence does not delve into the complex issue of bursaries and related costs for the student such as room and board.

This presentation is based on a pending contribution to the CSHE Research and Occasional Paper Series, available at: http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?s=1