Student Experience

Virtualpolitik: Obstacles to Building Virtual Communities in Traditional Institutions of Knowledge

Elizabeth Losh
2005

Digital collaborations are often stymied because institutions of higher education are increasingly divided between two cultures: the culture of knowledge and the culture of information. Campuses primarily remain institutions of knowledge, although practices of information acquisition can no longer be ignored, especially since the advent of networked computing and study with digital texts. Yet the traditional division of labor and the ownership of intellectual property within the academy are threatened by digital collaborations; and the claims of information theory, which is...

The Educational Benefits Of Sustaining Cross-Racial Interaction Among Undergraduates

Mitchell J. Chang
Nida Denson
Victor Saenz
Kimberly Misa
2005

This study examined whether or not students who either had higher levels of cross-racial interaction during college or had same-institution peers with higher average levels of this type of interaction tend to report significantly larger developmental gains than their counterparts. Unlike previous quantitative studies that tested cross-racial interaction using single-level linear models, this study more accurately models the structure of multilevel data by applying Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM). The general pattern of findings suggests that higher individual levels of cross-...

Report: Learning And Academic Engagement In The Multiversity - Results Of The First University Of California Undergraduate Experience Survey

Richard Flacks
Gregg Thomson
John Aubrey Douglass
Kyra Caspary
2004

During the Spring of 2002 and 2003, a team of faculty and institutional researchers conducted an innovative web-based survey on the undergraduate experience at all eight undergraduate campuses of the University of California. This report provides the first formal presentation of preliminary findings from that survey and discusses potential areas of relevance to policy for further research.

New Directions For Student Outreach: The University Of California's School-University Partnerships

Thomas Timar
Rodney Ogawa
Marie Orillion
2002

In academic year 1998-99 the University of California launched an unprecedented campaign to enhance its outreach to the state’s K-12 public education system. While the University has long been involved in outreach programs that provide tutors, mentors and campus visits to middle and high school students, the current campaign added a new dimension to its educational outreach portfolio: partnerships between the University and educationally low performing high schools. The program aimed to improve the overall academic performance of targeted high schools and their feeder middle and elementary...

The Role Of Advanced Placement And Honors Courses In College Admissions

Saul Geiser
Veronica Santelices
2004

This study examines the role of Advanced Placement (AP) and other honors-level courses as a criterion for admission at a leading public university, the University of California, and finds that the number of AP and honors courses taken in high school bears little or no relationship to students’ later performance in college. AP is increasingly emphasized as a factor in admissions, particularly at selective colleges and universities. But while student performance on AP examinations is strongly related to college performance, merely taking AP or other honors-level courses in...

Validity Of High-School Grades In Predicting Student Success Beyond The Freshman Year: High-School Record vs. Standardized Tests as Indicators of Four-Year College Outcomes, by Saul Geiser and Maria Veronica Santelices

Saul Geiser
Maria Veronica Santelices
2007

High-school grades are often viewed as an unreliable criterion for college admissions, owing to differences in grading standards across high schools, while standardized tests are seen as methodologically rigorous, providing a more uniform and valid yardstick for assessing student ability and achievement. The present study challenges that conventional view. The study finds that high-school grade point average (HSGPA) is consistently the best predictor not only of freshman grades in college, the outcome indicator most often employed in predictive-validity studies, but of four-year college...

Igor Chirikov

Senior Researcher and SERU Consortium Director

Igor Chirikov is the Director of the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Consortium and Senior Researcher at CSHE. SERU Consortium is an academic and policy research collaboration based at Center for Studies in Higher Education at the UC Berkeley working in partnership with Etio and member universities. The Consortium is a group of leading research-intensive universities that increase student success by generating and analyzing comparative data on the student experience.

As SERU Consortium Director Igor Chirikov has broad responsibilities for overall SERU Consortium...

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...

The "Turning Point" for Minority Pre-Meds: The Effect of Early Undergraduate Experience in the Sciences on Aspirations to Enter Medical School of Minority Students at UC Berkeley and Stanford University, by Donald A. Barr and John Matsui

Donald A. Barr
John Matsui
2008

The University of California faces the challenge of increasing the diversity of students graduating from its medical schools while also adhering to mandated restrictions on the use of race or ethnicity in the admissions process. Students from diverse backgrounds who gain admission as undergraduates to UC Berkeley and express an early interest in a medical career are an important potential source of medical students for the UC system. However previous data suggest that many of these undergraduate students lose interest in a medical career and never apply to medical school. We report on...

The Management of Intercollegiate Athletics at UC Berkeley: Turning Points and Consequences, by John Cummins and Kirsten Hextrum

John Cummins
Kirsten Hextrum
2013

This white paper is based on a larger project being conducted with the Regional Oral History Office at the Bancroft Library. The purpose of the research is to explore the history of the management of Intercollegiate Athletics at UC Berkeley from the 1960s to the present. The project began in 2009 and will include, when completed, approximately 70 oral history interviews of individuals who played key roles in the management of intercollegiate athletics over that period of time – Chancellors, Athletic Directors, senior administrators, Faculty Athletic Representatives, other key faculty...