News

BERKELEY, CA, October 5, 2015 – William Deresiewicz, author of a controversial new book, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, will present the argument that the culture of elite education stifles risk-taking and independent thinking, in a conversation with Carol Christ, Director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education, at Berkeley, on Oct. 7th.

BERKELEY, CA, September 29, 2015 – Jamie Merisotis, President and CEO of Lumina Foundation and recognized leader in philanthropy, higher education, and public policy, will describe how to develop national resources to push the U.S. back to world prominence, the focus of his new book America Needs Talent, at a talk at Berkeley on Oct. 2. In a conversation with Carol Christ, Director of Center for Studies in Higher Education, Merisotis will explain why the U.S. needs talent to usher in a new era of innovation and success, and why government, the private sector, education, and individuals must make deliberate choices to grow talent in America. Merisotis states:

BERKELEY, CA, September 21, 2015 – Dr. Stephen Kosslyn, Dean of Arts and Sciences at Minerva, will speak at Berkeley on Sept. 21 on key aspects of the Minerva program, which globally immerses students of the virtual campus as they study in cities around the world. The Minerva Schools at the Keck Graduate Institute (KGI), established in 2014, is a four-year undergraduate program founded as a partnership between the Minerva Project and KGI. Minerva’s founder, Ben Nelson, former Snapfish president, has scrapped every commonly held assumption about how people should be educated. Minerva offers a newly invented curriculum, cultural immersion, and small interactive online seminars to prepare students to become global leaders and innovators. Nelson states, “We are effectively building a perfect university and we are trying to educate people who we would be excited to see in positions of leadership and influence in the world.”

BERKELEY, CA, September 11, 2015 – Dr. Jorge Klor de Alva, president of Nexus Research and Policy Center , will spotlight the findings of a controversial study, “Rich Schools, Poor Students: Tapping Large University Endowments to Improve Student Outcomes” in a Sept. 16 presentation at Berkeley sponsored by the Center for Studies in Higher Education and the Social Science Matrix. The study demonstrates that private universities are not necessarily private. Many are sitting on millions, if not billions, of dollars in tax-exempt endowments. These tax exemptions are government subsidies and dwarf appropriations for public universities. To address the issue of funding equity, the study recommends restructuring the tax breaks to pay for additional student services that would replace the Obama administration’s plan for free tuition at community colleges.

The argument that cultural and other forms of diversity enhance the educational experience of all students is generally associated with post-1960 efforts to expand the presence of disadvantaged groups on the campuses of America’s universities and colleges. Yet, as CSHE researcher John Douglass explains in the new article, “International Berkeley” published in the academic journal Voprosy Obrazovaniya, arguments on the merits of cultural diversity have much earlier roots in the historical enrollment of international students. more

May 23, 2015 - Read Carol Christ's, former President of Smith College and current CSHE Director, thoughts on free education.

May 4, 2015 - Richard C. Atkinson, President Emeritus of the University of California, and Saul Geiser, Research Associate at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, write an op-ed article in The New York Times about the College Board's revised SAT.

Carol Christ, former President of Smith College and current CSHE Director, reviews Remaking College: The changing ecology of higher education (Stanford University Press, 2015) written by Michael Kirst, Professor Emeritus of Education and Business Administration at Stanford University and the current President of the California State Board of Education and Mitchell Stevens, Associate Professor of Education at Stanford University.

Dr. Ronald L. Huesman, Jr. (Ron) is a CSHE Research Associate and the Managing Director of the Student Experience in the Research University-Association of American Universities Consortium (SERU-AAU). SERU-AAU is an academic and policy research partnership between the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California – Berkeley and the University of Minnesota. The SERU-AAU consortium is a group of leading research extensive universities in the United States made up of researchers and scholars who collaborate to generate institutional, comparative, and longitudinal data on student experience in research universities.

The Center takes great pleasure in announcing the autobiography of Neil J. Smelser, University Professor Emeritus of Sociology and past Center Director. Entitled Wanderlust in Academia, the autobiography is available on-line at the Center’s eScholarship site.

I began my career at Berkeley in 1970, as a faculty member in the English Department. My academic specialty is Victorian literature. In the course of my faculty career, I held a series of administrative positions: chair of my department, Dean of Humanities, Provost and Dean of the College of Letters and Science, and Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor.

Dear Colleagues, It is with great pleasure that we announce Professor Emerita Carol T. Christ as the director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE). Director Christ’s appointment will begin on January 1, 2015. Carol Christ brings to this position her comprehensive leadership experience, deep knowledge of the Berkeley campus, and a forward-looking perspective for the Center.

The Center for Studies in Higher Education is pleased to announce a new collaboration: the President Emeritus David Pierpont Gardner website. Debuting early August, Dr. Gardner’s website will highlight his presidencies at the University of Utah from 1973-1983 and the University of California from 1983-1992.

April 28, 2014 - It’s a familiar if not fully explained paradigm. A “World Class University” (WCU) is supposed to have highly ranked research output, a culture of excellence, great facilities, and a brand name that transcends national borders. But perhaps most important, the particular institution needs to sit in the upper echelons of one or more world rankings generated each year by non-profit and for-profit entities. That is the ultimate proof for many government ministers and for much of the global higher education community. Or is it?

April 24, 2014 - The proportion of California high school graduates attending the University of California has fallen to its lowest level in three decades, according to a new study in the Center’s Research and Occasional Paper Series. Only 7.3 percent of the state’s graduating high school seniors entered UC as freshmen between 2010 and 2012, the lowest percentage since 1982. “Back to the Future: Freshman Admissions at the University of California, 1994 to the Present and Beyond,” is based on a sample of 1.1 million California high school graduates who applied for admission as freshmen at UC over the past two decades. The author, Saul Geiser, is a research associate at the Center and former director of research for admissions and outreach at UC’s Office of the President.

Dr. Qiang Guo has been a postdoctoral Visiting Scholar at the Center for Studies in Higher Education since July 2013, working under the mentorship of CSHE Director C. Judson King and Professor Wen-hsin Yeh of the Berkeley History Department.