Some fifty years ago, researchers based at Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education launched a series of innovative studies on the character and disposition of undergraduate students in America’s colleges and universities. It was part of a wave of interest in the student experience and views, bolstered by the surge in university enrollment and a national commitment to mass higher education. Paul Heist, T.R. McConnell, Martin Trow, and Burton Clark, all affiliates of the Center, pioneered studies on student culture, and incorporated surveys as one method of analysis.
In the spring of 1957, the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) at the University of California, Berkeley was formally established as an organized research unit, enabled by an initial grant from the Carnegie Corporation and making it the first academic enterprise in the United States focused on higher education policy issues.
The University of California has long been a major source of socioeconomic mobility in California. Data from the University of California’s Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES) indicates that more than half the undergraduate students in the UC system have at least one parent that is an immigrant. The ratio is even higher at UC Berkeley. What do such a high percentage of students with recent immigrant backgrounds tell us about the University of California and socioeconomic mobility?
The University of California’s census survey of undergraduates, UCUES, presents an opportunity to measure both disciplinary and institutional differences in students’ academic experience. Results from nearly 60,000 responses (38% response rate) from the 2006 administration found greater variance among majors within an institution than between equivalent majors across institutions. Cluster analysis techniques were employed to establish disciplinary patterns, with traditional distinctions between hard and soft sciences generally supported.
Dramatic enrollment expansion at the undergraduate level and institutional diversification are characteristics frequently used to describe major trends in China's massive higher education system. A less understood phenomenon is the relatively new and rapid establishment of graduate level programs that have implications for national economic development.
This paper traces the historical development of the American research and technology enterprise from its origins in the post-Civil War period to its current international dominance in the discovery and dissemination of scientific knowledge. U.S. research universities have become the vital center of this enterprise over the past 60 years. But competitors in Europe and Asia, many of them looking to the American research university as a model, are beginning to challenge U.S. leadership in science and technology.
This article examines the intellectual history of The Uses of the University, including the influence of José Ortega y Gasset’s ideas about higher education, with a view to exploring Clark Kerr’s vision for the university and how that vision might be expanded to take account of present challenges, in particular, diversity. The paper, which calls for leadership renewal and succession planning, pays special attention to the two types of administrators defined by Kerr--the visionary hedgehog and the shrewd fox.
The universe of postsecondary education is expanding. It is an era of rapid demographic and labor market changes, increased competition and shifts in institutional form (e.g., the rise of for profit degree granters, the hybrid form of nonprofit/for-profit partnerships, corporate universities), and new forms of delivery driven by emerging technologies. In nearly all of these cases, the pace of innovation and establishment of new institutional forms outstrips the ability of regulators or policy makers to stay ahead of the curve.