ROPS 2017

Affording the Dream: Student Debt and State Need-Based Grant Aid for Public University Students by C. Eaton, S. Kulkarni, R. Birgeneau, H. Brady, and M. Hout

C. Eaton
S. Kulkarni
Robert Birgeneau
Henry Brady
Michael Hout
2017

Public research universities are a key vehicle for educational mobility. Yet rising student debt for undergraduate students has created new risks, particularly for lower income students at lower ranked universities. We find that student loan default rates reached 35 percent for low-income students at public universities with low research rankings during the Great Recession. Given these troubling loan default rates, we find encouraging evidence that a few U.S. states have adopted robust need-based grant aid programs to make college more affordable for low-income students. Such grant...

Preservation of Educational Inequality in Doctoral Education: Tacit Knowledge, Implicit Bias and University Faculty, by Anne J. MacLachlan

Anne MacLachlan
2017

Making doctoral education accessible and successful for students from low income, first generation families as well as members of immigrant or specific ethnic groups is a world- wide problem. In the US the traditional explanation for the low numbers of Ph.D. recipients from these groups are lack of preparation, lack of interest and a “leaky pipeline.” These alone are not enough to explain disparities. This article argues that the most powerful vehicles of exclusion are tacit knowledge and the implicit bias of faculty and is related to doctoral/faculty socialization. Faculty share the...

Fostering Global Competence Through Internationalization at American Research Universities, by I. Shcheglova, G. Thomson and Martha​ ​C.​ ​Merrill

Irina Shcheglova
Gregg Thomson
Martha​ ​C.​ ​Merrill
2017

American research universities have recently joined the march for internationalization and now are putting explicit efforts into finding ways to create an international focus. Within a short number of years, missions have been transformed, incorporating elements of globalization. Universities now declare the importance of preparing students to live and work in a multicultural and global world. They document the increased numbers of international students and faculty on campus and their support for Study Abroad programs that provide first-hand international experience as well as for...

Australian Universities at a Crossroads, by W. Lacy, G. Croucher, A. Brett, R. Mueller

William B. Lacy
Gwilym Croucher
André Brett
Romina Mueller
2017

This study provides an overview of the history, current status, and future challenges to the Australian university system through the eyes of its leaders. Hopefully, the report will be informative and useful and will raise critical and important issues that need to be considered and addressed for the continuing success of the system and the society it enables. The intended audience includes: university leaders, managers and staff; higher education policy makers and analysts; and, Australian and global higher education researchers and scholars.

A University in the Wilderness: Building a Community and Culture at the New University of California by Karen Merritt

Karen Merritt
2017

When the University of California moved to a permanent campus site in Berkeley, many described what they found there as a wilderness. Early faculty and students proceeded to build a campus and community, creating clubs, musical groups, fraternities, and athletics. This experience is brought to life in this essay through contemporary memoirs and campus publications, notably, the papers of a leading university family, Joseph Le Conte with his son, J.N. Le Conte, and youngest daughter, Carrie Le Conte. Through these sources, we can glimpse student life between 1880, when Carrie matriculated,...

A Cautionary Analysis of a Billion Dollar Athletic Expenditure by John Cummins

John Cummins
2017

This paper is a description and analysis of the history of the renovation of Memorial Stadium and the building of the Barclay Simpson Student Athlete High Performance Center (SAHPC) on the Berkeley campus, showing how incremental changes over time result in a much riskier and financially less viable project than originally anticipated. It describes the decision making process, the role of various constituent groups including senior administrators and the UC Regents, faculty, community members and local and state governmental officials, donors and protesters. It includes the legal...

American Universities in Trumpland​ ​-​ ​Financial​ ​Ruin​ ​Averted? by John​ ​Aubrey​ ​Douglass

John Aubrey Douglass
2017

The Trump administration has no significant plan or strategy related to higher education. The only major policy declarations -- to eliminate federal regulations on for-profit colleges and revisit federal guidelines on sexual assault on college campuses – both unravel policies developed under the Obama administration. Where the fate of higher education lies is in the innumerable initiatives bent on pleasing Trump’s base and in the search for some sort of major legislative victory. As of this writing, this now includes a Republican coalition that wants to cut the funding for most federal...

Quality and the new Flagship University Ideal in Asian Higher Education, by David P. Ericson

David P. Ericson
2017

A singular vision has propelled higher education and ministries of education in Asia since the new millennium. It is a vision launched
by the once rising tide of a globalized world order that spilled into higher education: in order to be competitive on the world scene,
each Asian country had to build “World Class Universities,” which could be compared and rank-ordered with the pre-eminent
research universities of America, Britain and elsewhere. And if the pre-eminent American and British research universities could
not be quickly surpassed, punctuated jumps up the status ladder...

STUDENT EXPOSURE TO SOCIAL ISSUES AND CORRELATIONS WITH VOTING: Gauging the Impact on Economically Disadvantaged Students at Major Public American Universities by V. Porterfield CSHE 5.17 (April 2017)

V. Porterfield
2017

Higher levels of civic and community engagement in higher education are positively associated with students’ academic performance and they also build upon citizenship skills such as informed voting. Yet, while these are worthy and important outcomes of higher education, students from disadvantaged backgrounds can have more difficulty navigating civic engagement. Focusing on students at thirteen major public universities in the United States, and utilizing survey data generated by the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Consortium, this study suggest social perspective-...

DOES IT PAY TO BE A STEM GRADUATE? Evidence from the Polish Graduate Tracking System by Tomasz Zając, Mikołaj Jasiński, and Marek Bożykowski, University of Warsaw CSHE 13.17 (November 2017)

Tomasz Zajac
Mikołaj Jasiński
Marek Bożykowski
2017

Returns to education have received much attention from scholars as well as policy makers and the media. It is a well-established fact that educational attainment improves employability and wages and that university graduates better than their less educated counterparts. However, the educational expansion rises the importance of the horizontal dimension in explaining social stratification. The field of study has proved to be an important factor for graduates’ labor market performance in many countries. This paper discusses the differences in the labor market outcomes in early careers of...