Institutional Research

ASYMMETRY BY DESIGN? Identity Obfuscation, Reputational Pressure, and Consumer Predation in U.S. For-Profit Higher Education, by Adam Goldstein and Charlie Eaton CSHE 5.20 (May 2020)

Adam Goldstein
Charlie Eaton
2020

This article develops and tests an identity-based account of malfeasance in consumer markets. It is hypothesized that multi-brand organizational structures help predatory firms short-circuit reputational discipline by rendering their underlying identities opaque to consumer audiences. The analysis utilizes comprehensive administrative data on all for-profit U.S. colleges, an industry characterized by widespread fraud and poor (though variable) educational outcomes. Consistent with the hypothesis that brand differentiation facilitates malfeasance by reducing ex ante reputational risks,...

RE-IMAGINING CALIFORNIA HIGHER EDUCATION

John Aubrey Douglass
2010

2010 marks the 50th anniversary of California’s famed Master Plan for Higher Education, arguably the single most influential effort to plan the future of a system of higher education in the annals of American higher education. This essay builds on the analysis offered in a previous CSHE research paper (“From Chaos to Order and Back”) by discussing the major challenges facing California’s higher education system, and offering a possibly pathway to reforms and institution-building essential for bolstering socioeconomic mobility and greater economic competitiveness. Most critics and...

FROM CHAOS TO ORDER AND BACK?A Revisionist Reflection on the California Master Plan for Higher Education@50 and Thoughts About its Future

John Aubrey Douglass
2010

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...

Investment Patterns In California Higher Education And Policy Options For A Possible Future

John Aubrey Douglass
2002

What has been the level of public investment in this higher education system, and how has it performed over the past century? What are the challenges that California higher education faces in the future and what level of investment is necessary? This paper attempts to provide an historical context to these questions to assist Californians as they once again consider how to expand educational opportunity. California now faces a dramatic new period of potential enrollment and program growth that will have a significant impact on socio-economic mobility, and on the state's economic...

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) at the University of California - Berkeley. He is the author of Neo-Nationalism and Universities (Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press 2021), Envisioning the Asian...

Refocusing institutional research on university needs

John Aubrey Douglass
Igor Chirikov
2020

The COVID-19 pandemic is all-absorbing, requiring university leaders and academic staff to deal with major transitions in teaching to online formats, probable declines in revenue, hiring freezes and lay-offs and attempts to plan for what lies ahead.

To navigate this difficult path, universities need to intensify their institutional data collection and analysis. Yet most universities, especially outside of the United States and a few other countries, have limited formal policies and strategies for gathering institutional data and for employing trained staff to generate the...

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...

Does Conflict of Interest Distort Global University Rankings? By Igor Chirikov CSHE 5.21 (April 2021)

Igor Chirikov
2021

Global university rankings influence students’ choices and higher education policies throughout the world.When rankers not only evaluate universities but also provide them with consulting, analytics, or advertising servicesrankers are vulnerable to conflicts of interestthat may potentiallydistort theirrankingsThepaperassessesthe impact of contracting with rankers on...

Pathways for Improving Doctoral Education – Using Data in the Pre- and Post-COVID Era

John Aubrey Douglass
Igor Chirikov
2021

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic altered the perception of the management challenges facing universities, globally. It has changed the market for domestic and international students, required institutions to move rapidly to online and remote teaching, and brought into question the funding model for many universities, particularly with the specter of reduced tuition income and state funding under the assumption of a global recession.
But is also true that the pandemic, and its impact on higher education, varies by nation, and even by the collective pan-regional response – e.g., Europe...

Facilitating Academic Curriculum in Learning, In Teaching, and Threaded Evidence by Joseph Martin Stevenson and Karen Wilson Stevenson, CSHE 2.21 (February 2021)

2021

Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) are often the center of discussion among faculty in higher education during discourse about curriculum conceptualization, design, planning development, and implementation. This commentary offers a functionally-centered framework that places faculty feasibility, fluidity, freedom, and flexibility around a core conceptualization of SLOs in the context of overall alignment within the college curriculum. The framework could be useful to readers failing to have shared governance over the curriculum, readers facing accreditation adherence, as well as readers...