ROPS 2010

HIGHER EDUCATION BUDGETS AND THE GLOBAL RECESSION: Tracking Varied National Responses and Their Consequences

John Aubrey Douglass
2010

In the midst of the global recession, how have national governments viewed the role of higher education in their evolving strategies for economic recovery? Demand for higher education generally goes up during economic downturns. Which nations
have proactively protected funding for their universities and colleges to help maintain access, to help retrain workers, and to mitigate unemployment rates? And which nations have simply made large funding cuts for higher education in light of the severe downturn in tax revenues? This essay provides a moment-in-time review of the...

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...

Science and the Entrepreneurial University, by Richard C. Atkinson

Richard C. Atkinson
2010

The current and still-evolving role of the American research university has been shaped by four key developments in the past sixty-five years: the historic decision to establish a comprehensive postwar federal science policy, described in Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report, Science, The Endless Frontier; the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980; economic analyses from the 1950s onward that have validated the central role of knowledge in economic growth and influenced government and university policy on industry-university research; and various experiments with such research that have led to an increasing...

Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines by Diane Harley, Sophia Krzys Acord, Sarah Earl-Novell, Shannon Lawrence, and C. Judson King

Diane Harley
Sophia Krzys Acord
Sarah Earl-Novell
Shannon Lawrence
C. Judson King
2010

Since 2005, the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has been conducting research to understand the needs and practices of faculty for in-progress scholarly communication (i.e., forms of communication employed as research is being executed) as well as archival publication. The complete results of our work are available at the Future of Scholarly Communicationproject’s website. We describe here the results of our research conducted between 2007 and 2010. In the interest of developing a deeper understanding of how and why...

Financing EU Student Mobility: A Proposed Credit Union Scheme for Europe, by Cécile Hoareau

Cécile Hoareau
2010

Governments worldwide face the challenge of financing a growing student population with limited resources, especially in the current context of difficult economic recovery. Student loan schemes, because they appear as cost-efficient and are defendable on the lines of social equity (students invest in their future), are increasingly politically attractive. It was therefore only a matter of time before the European Union considered the feasibility of implementing a similar scheme. Such a lending scheme faces EU-specific limitations. The Union has more limited resources than a fully-...

Master Planning in Brazilian Higher Education: Expanding the 3-Year Public College System in the State of São Paulo, by Renato H. L. Pedrosa

Renato H. L. Pedrosa
2010

Until recently, Higher education (HE) in Brazil had been, identified with colleges and universities running traditional academic undergraduate programs, with expected graduation time of 4 years or more. The universities in the state of São Paulo are at the top of international rankings among Brazilian HEIs, accounting for about half of all indexed research done in Brazil and responsible for 40% of all PhD degrees granted in the country. They have a total enrolment of almost 200,000 students, about 1/3 of those in graduate programs. However, by 2000, with pressure for expansion of the...

What Future for UK Higher Education? by Roger Brown

Roger Brown
2010

Historically, the UK system has been one of the most successful in combining excellence with access. However the favorable conditions that British universities and colleges have enjoyed in recent years, associated in large part with the introduction of higher tuition fees in 2006, are coming to an end. British universities and colleges face a future of static or even falling local demand, increasing local and international competition, severe public and private expenditure constraints, increased regulation, and greater difficulties in aligning costs with income. In the first instance...

The Multidisciplinary Imperative in Higher Education, by C. Judson King

C. Judson King
2010

Disciplines codify related knowledge and have developed powerful approaches that enable both solutions to a wide variety of problems and efficient further extension of knowledge. Individual disciplines have translated into individual departments within universities. Academic departments tend to turn inward, deepening the knowledge within the discipline. Because of this inwardness, the differing methodological approaches among disciplines, and the reward systems within disciplines and universities, it is difficult for faculty to reach outside their disciplines and departments, so as to...

Leadership, Diversity and Succession Planning in Academia, by Cristina Gonzalez

Cristina Gonzalez
2010

Although academia is becoming more like business in many respects - not all of them positive - it has not borrowed one of the best attributes of business culture: its tradition of developing leadership through succession planning. As a result, much talent is underutilized. This includes, most prominently, that of women and minorities, who tend not to be perceived as leadership material. This paper makes a distinction between two levels of academic administrators: deans and above, who are professional administrators, and department chairs and below, who could be characterized as...

AFFORDABLE AND OPEN TEXTBOOKS: An Exploratory Study of Faculty Attitudes

Diane Harley
Shannon Lawrence
Sophia Krzys Acord
Jason Dixson
2010

The textbook industry is in significant flux that is fueled by evolving technologies, increased availability of online open content and curricula, active used textbook markets, and, most recently, a rash of textbook rental start-ups, just to name a few of the factors at play. At the same time, Open Educational Resources (OERs)—learning materials distributed openly for either no or minimal cost—may have become commonplace enough that a credible, viable infrastructure for open textbooks, one that mainstream faculty would accept, could be imagined.

Our research, which employed an...