Institutional Research

ACCOUNTABILITY IN POSTSECONDARY EDUCATION REVISITED

David E. Leveille
2013

Accountability in the private and public sectors of society has received significant attention in both research and practice, partly because of its importance, but also because it is challenging to define, measure and implement. The nature of accountability is complex, ambiguous and highly context-dependent. As related to postsecondary education (PSE), multiple stakeholders across the nation have been pushing for greater accountability for at least three decades. Various stakeholders, including elected officials at the national and state level seemingly obsessed with achieving a "one...

INTERNAL STAFF ALLOCATION AND THE CHANGING WORKLOAD OF JAPANESE PROFESSORIATE: A Multilevel Statistical Analysis with Simulations

Satoshi P. Watanabe
Masataka Murasawa
Yasumi Abe
2013

The increasingly competitive and globalizing environment of today’s higher education market has compelled many colleges and universities around the world to revamp their academic programs and organizational structures by responsively addressing various contemporary issues raised by internal as well as external stakeholders. It is no exception that Japanese colleges and universities have gone through a period of dramatic transition over the last decade under considerable pressure and influence of the central government’s stringent policy mandates. Although the government-led reforms...

TO GROW OR NOT TO GROW? A Post-Great Recession Synopsis of the Political, Financial, and Social Contract Challenges Facing the University of California

John Aubrey Douglass
2013

After more than two decades of state disinvestment, the University of California faces significant challenges and misunderstandings regarding its operating costs, its wide array of activities, and its mission. Reduced funding from the state for public higher education, including UC, has essentially severed the historic link between state allocations and enrollment, altering the incentive and ability for UC to expand academic programs and enrollment in pace with California’s growing population. “To grow or not to grow?,” that is the question. This macro management and major...

THE UC CLIOMETRIC HISTORY PROJECT AND FORMATTED OPTICAL CHARACTER RECOGNITION by Zachary Bleemer, UC Berkeley CSHE 3.18 (February 2018)

Zachary Bleemer
2018

In what ways—and to what degree—have universities contributed to the long-run growth, health, economic mobility, and gender/ethnic equity of their students’ communities and home states? The University of California ClioMetric History Project (UC-CHP), based at the Center for Studies in Higher Education, extends prior research on this question in two ways. First, we have developed a novel digitization protocol—formatted optical character recognition (fOCR)—which transforms scanned structured and semi-structured texts like university directories and catalogs into high-quality computer-...

DIVERSITY MATTERS: New Directions for Institutional Research on Undergraduate Racial/Ethnic and Economic Diversity

Gregg Thomson
2011

This paper reviews the new directions in institutional research on undergraduate racial/ethnic and socioeconomic diversity at the University of California, Berkeley. The use of SERU/UCUES and other web-based census surveys has made possible more detailed and extensive analysis of student diversity. Included is research on an expanded number of racial/ethnic groups and on multiracial students, the significance of the African American experience, implications of the new IPEDS racial/ethnic reporting requirements, and a closer examination of Pell Grant and first-generation college...

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...

Four Draft Working Papers: PEER REVIEW IN ACADEMIC PROMOTION AND PUBLISHING: Its Meaning, Locus, and Future

Diane Harley
Sophia Krzys Acord
2010

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...

Recognizing and then Using Disciplinary Patterns of the Undergraduate Experience: Getting Past Institutional Standards

Steve Chatman
2009

The assertion that there are a limited set of generalizable good educational practices (Chickering & Gamson, 1987) with a common model of preferred active student engagement in learning (Kuh, 2001) is appealing to those responsible for simply stated institutional outcomes and to the faculty who teach in fields that espouse the same practices and outcomes (Braxton, 1998). After all, if they are wrong and educational experience and good educational practices differ in important, substantive, and replicable ways by area of academic major, then assessment, accountability, administration,...

Decoding Learning Gains: Measuring Outcomes and the Pivotal Role of the Major and Student Backgrounds

Gregg Thomson
John Aubrey Douglass
2009

Throughout the world, interest in gauging learning outcomes at all levels of education has grown considerably over the past decade. In higher education, measuring “learning outcomes” is viewed by many stakeholders as a relatively new method to judge the “value added” of colleges and universities. The potential to accurately measure learning gains is also viewed as a diagnostic tool for institutional self-improvement. This essay compares the methodology and potential uses of three tools for measuring learning outcomes: the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), the National Survey of...

Accountability in Higher Education:A Public Agenda for Trust and Cultural Change

David E. Leveille
2006

This timely report focuses on accountability -- the current lingua franca of higher education -- and the question of the public trust as a reflection of the respect and confidence of the people that are served by the nation's colleges and universities. Designed to assist policymakers and educational leaders, the report identifies the components of a state-level higher education accountability system: acting on a public agenda, maintaining the public trust of the people served by higher education,...