ROPS 2016

What was the role of imperfect local information in the growth, gender gap, and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) major selection of early 20th century American universities? In order to examine pre-1950 American higher education, this study constructs four rich panel datasets covering most students, high school teachers, and doctors in the state of California between 1893 and 1946 using recently-digitized administrative and commercial directories. Students attending large California universities came from more than 600 California towns by 1910, with substantial...

Universities throughout the world are trending toward more performance based methods to capture their strengths, weaknesses and productivity. Hiroshima University has developed an integrated objective measure for quantifying multifaceted faculty activities, namely the “Achievement-Motivated Key Performance Indicator” (A-KPI), in order to visualize the strengths and weaknesses of the university, while balancing versatile faculty activities university-wide. We believe any reform efforts should be based on accurate understanding of the status quo through rigorous self-assessment. This...

The University of California, the nation’s first multicampus system, is unique in its central organizing principle, known as the one-university idea. Its premise is simple: that a large and decentralized system of campuses, which share the same mission but differ in size, interests, aspirations, and stage of development, can nevertheless be governed as a single university. Long regarded as a major structural reason for the UC system’s rise to pre-eminence among public research universities, the one-university model has been a unifying administrative and cultural ethos within UC for...

The SAT is used for two purposes at the University of California. First is eligibility: Determining whether applicants meet the minimum requirements for admission to the UC system. Second is admissions selection: At high-demand campuses such as Berkeley, with many more eligible applicants than places available, test scores are used to select from among them. UC policy delegates authority to the faculty at each campus to establish local admissions procedures that reflect “campus values and academic priorities.” Under the proposal outlined...

Many small private liberal arts colleges struggle to make their enrollment targets, while many public universities cannot meet enrollment demand. Thinking creatively about collaboration between these kinds of institutions might increase the capacity of our higher education system. This essay explores models by which we might do so.