ROPS 2021

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...

Top Percent Policies and the Return to Postsecondary Selectivity, by Zachary Bleemer, CSHE 1.21 (January 2021)

Zachary Bleemer
2021

I study the efficacy of test-based meritocracy in college admissions by evaluating the impact of a grade-based “top percent'' policy implemented by the University of California. Eligibility in the Local Context (ELC) provided large admission advantages to the top four percent of 2001-2011 graduates from each California high school. I construct a novel longitudinal dataset linking the ELC era’s 1.8 million UC applicants to educational and labor market outcomes. I first employ a regression discontinuity design to show that ELC led over 10 percent of barely-eligible applicants from low-...

ROPS 2021

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...

Resilience and Resistance: The Community College in a Pandemic, by Brian Murphy, CSHE 6.21 (April 2021)

Brian Murphy
2021

All universities and colleges in the United States were deeply and immediately affected by the sudden appearance of Covid-19. Two-year public community colleges suffered the same fate as their university neighbors: the immediate needs were to close up operations, shift instruction to online and distance modalities and keep students engaged and focused when all around them collapsed. But the community colleges suffered under constraints not shared by many of their university neighbors: limited discretionary, little or no funding from endowments to fall back on and students whose limited...