ROPS 2010

Since 2005, the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has been conducting research to understand the needs and practices of faculty for in-progress scholarly communication (i.e., forms of communication employed as research is being executed) as well as archival publication. The complete results of our work are available at the Future of Scholarly Communicationproject’s website. We describe here the results of our research conducted between 2007 and 2010. In the interest of developing a deeper understanding of how and why...

Co-written by the SERU Research Team of Steven Brint, John Aubrey Douglass, Gregg Thomson, and Steve Chatman, this year’s report offers two new areas for analysis – the extent of research engagement among undergraduates at UC, and data on student self-assessed learning gains. Among their findings:

As part of its Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Future of Scholarly Communication Project, the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) has hosted two meetings to explore how peer review relates to scholarly communication and academic values. In preparation for an April 2010 workshop, four working papers were developed and circulated. They are presented as drafts here. (The proceedings from the April 2010 meeting will be published at a future date.) The topics covered include assessing the myriad forms peer review takes in the academy, which forms of peer review are used for...

The current and still-evolving role of the American research university has been shaped by four key developments in the past sixty-five years: the historic decision to establish a comprehensive postwar federal science policy, described in Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report, Science, The Endless Frontier; the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980; economic analyses from the 1950s onward that have validated the central role of knowledge in economic growth and influenced government and university policy on industry-university research; and various experiments with such research that have led to an increasing...

The immigrant college student population will likely continue to increase. This exploratory study addresses the questions: To what extent does sense of belonging/satisfaction of recent immigrant college students differ from non-immigrant college students? Do perceived self-ratings of belonging vary by immigrant generations? This research draws on a new extensive data source, the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) survey. Survey data from the 2009 SERU is based on the responses from 55,433 undergraduate students from six-large research institutions from across the United...

Disciplines codify related knowledge and have developed powerful approaches that enable both solutions to a wide variety of problems and efficient further extension of knowledge. Individual disciplines have translated into individual departments within universities. Academic departments tend to turn inward, deepening the knowledge within the discipline. Because of this inwardness, the differing methodological approaches among disciplines, and the reward systems within disciplines and universities, it is difficult for faculty to reach outside their disciplines and departments, so as to...

Governments worldwide face the challenge of financing a growing student population with limited resources, especially in the current context of difficult economic recovery. Student loan schemes, because they appear as cost-efficient and are defendable on the lines of social equity (students invest in their future), are increasingly politically attractive. It was therefore only a matter of time before the European Union considered the feasibility of implementing a similar scheme. Such a lending scheme faces EU-specific limitations. The Union has more limited resources than a fully-...

In 1960, California developed a "master plan" for its already famed public higher education system. It was and continues to be arguably the single most influential effort to plan the future of a system of higher education in the annals of American higher education. Despite popular belief, however, the California Master Plan for Higher Education is more important for what it preserved than what it created. There is much confusion regarding exactly how the Master Plan came about, what it said and did not say, and what portions of it are still relevant today. This essay provides a brief...