Higher Education Policy

Steven G. Brint

SERU Principal Researcher; Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy, University of California, Riverside
Sociology and Public Policy, University of California, Riverside

Steven Brint is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of California, Riverside, Director of the Colleges & Universities 2000 Project, and a Principal Researcher in the SERU Consortium.

Brint is an organizational sociologist whose research focuses on topics in the sociology of higher education, the sociology of professions, and middle-class politics. His studies of higher education have been funded for two decades by the National Science Foundation and two philanthropies. He is the author of four books: The Diverted Dream (with Jerome Karabel) (...

Janet Holmgren, Ph.D.

President Emerita, Mills College – Oakland, California; Senior Vice President for Strategic Advancement, University Now – San Francisco, California

Janet L. Holmgren is a consultant to higher education and nonprofit organizations. Her current and recent consulting work includes the Lower Cost Models for Independent Colleges Consortium, Bay Path University, the Women’s College Coalition, the East Bay Community Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Davis Education Foundation, the Peralta Community Colleges, Cooper University, UniversityNow, and the University of Advanced Technology. She speaks annually at the Education Leadership Academy of the University of California, Berkeley and is an adjunct faculty...

PEER REVIEW IN ACADEMIC PROMOTION AND PUBLISHING: ITS MEANING, LOCUS, AND FUTURE.

2011

Since 2005, and with generous support from the A.W. Mellon Foundation, The Future of Scholarly Communication Project at UC Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) has been exploring how academic values—including those related to peer review, publishing, sharing, and collaboration—influence scholarly communication practices and engagement with new technological affordances, open access publishing, and the public good. The current phase of the project focuses on peer review in...

Anne MacLachlan

Senior Researcher and Visiting Scholars Coordinator

Anne J. MacLachlan is a retired senior researcher at CSHE who continues to be devoted to increasing access, persistence, and success in postsecondary education for underrepresented groups (URM) including domestic minorities, women, and those from uneducated/poor families with an emphasis on those in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Her research areas cover the spectrum of postsecondary populations including community college and transfer students, undergraduates in general, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty. Among these, doctoral...

Tolani Britton

Assistant Professor - Graduate School of Education, UC Berkeley

Tolani Britton uses quasi-experimental methods to explore the impact of policies on students’ transition from secondary school to higher education, as well as access and retention in higher education. Recent work explores whether the disproportionate increase in incarceration of Black males for drug possessions and manufacture increased gaps in college enrollment rates by race and gender over two time periods- after the passage of the Anti-Drug Act from 1986 - 1993 and after the passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act from 1995 - 2000.

Prior to earning her...

NORM-REFERENCED TESTS AND RACE-BLIND ADMISSIONS: The Case for Eliminating the SAT and ACT at the University of California by Saul Geiser, UC Berkeley CSHE 15.17 (December 2017)

Saul Geiser
2017

Of all college admission criteria, scores on nationally normed tests like the SAT and ACT are most affected by the socioeconomic background of the student. The effect of socioeconomic background on test scores has grown substantially at University of California over the past two decades, and tests have become more of a barrier to admission of disadvantaged students. In 1994, socioeconomic background factors—family income, parents’ education, and race/ethnicity—accounted for 25 percent of the variation in test scores among California high school graduates who applied to UC. By 2011, they...

James Johnsen

Senior Fellow, National Association of System Heads

Jim is Senior Fellow at the National Association of System Heads (NASH) and Lecturer in the School of Management at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. At NASH Jim is working with leaders and scholars on a major “rethink” of the role of public university systems in achieving societal goals in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. He is a member of the Westerrn Commission on Higher Education.

Jim was President of the University of Alaska system from 2015 to 2020 during a period of severe state funding cuts, administrative consolidation, and academic...

Igor Chirikov

Senior Researcher and SERU Consortium Director

Igor Chirikov is the Director of the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Consortium and Senior Researcher at CSHE. SERU Consortium is an academic and policy research collaboration based at Center for Studies in Higher Education at the UC Berkeley working in partnership with Etio and member universities. The Consortium is a group of leading research-intensive universities that increase student success by generating and analyzing comparative data on the student experience.

As SERU Consortium Director Igor Chirikov has broad responsibilities for overall SERU Consortium...

Saul Geiser

Senior Associate

Saul Geiser is a research associate at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from UC Berkeley and taught there before joining UC’s Office of the President in 1981. Geiser served as director of admissions research for the UC system after Californians voted to end affirmative action in 1996, and he helped redesign UC admissions policy. His work has focused on issues of equity and validity in college admissions, with the aim of identifying admissions criteria that have less adverse impact on low-income and...

John Aubrey Douglass

Senior Research Fellow

John Aubrey Douglass is Senior Research Fellow - Public Policy and Higher Education at the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), and is a faculty member in the Goldman School of Public Policy, at the University of California - Berkeley. His research focuses on the forces and politics of globalization, the future of Democracy, the role of universities in economic development and socioeconomic mobility, the student experience and...