University of California

Tongshan Chang

Senior Researcher - SERU Consortium, UCOP

Tongshan Chang is Director of Institutional Research and Academic Planning at the University of California (UC) Office of the President and Consultant of UC Systemwide Academic Senate Committees on the Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS) and Preparatory Education (UCOPE). He is SERU (Student Experience in the Research University) Senior Researcher at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley, voluntarily assisting the SERU leadership and principal investigators in recruiting Chinese institutions and conducting...

Ellen Switkes

Senior Associate

Ellen Switkes is Senior Associate and Co-founder of the “Breakfast with George” mentoring program for higher education executives who are ready to move into senior executive positions. She also is co-founder and Director of CSHE’s Berkeley Institutes on Higher Education (BIHE), targeted to higher education leaders from nations outside the United States. BIHE focused on the essential characteristics of major research universities in the United States, with particular emphasis on the University of California as a case study, and on linking Institute programs with CSHE-based policy research...

James A. Hyatt, M.B.A.

Senior Research Associate, Vice Chancellor for Budget & Finance and CFO Emeritus, Former Associate Director, Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley

James A. Hyatt is a Senior Research Associate and Principal Investigator at the Center for Studies in Higher Education. He has extensive experience both as a senior level executive at a number of the nation’s major research universities, including UC Berkeley, the University of Maryland, College Park, University of Arizona, and Virginia Tech, and as a principal investigator on externally funded research projects in the areas of higher education financial management, financial reporting, pension reform and campus safety and security. From 2008-2010 Mr. Hyatt served as the President of the...

A Defining Time: The California State Geological Survey and its Temperamental Leader, Josiah Dwight Whitney, by Karen Merritt, CSHE 9.20 (August 2020)

Karen Merritt
2020

Josiah Dwight Whitney’s accomplishments as California’s State Geologist and director of the California State Geological Survey from 1860 to 1874 have been well-recognized. Whitney and his associates brought to the Survey the best science of their era that shaped their exploration, mapping, and collection of plant, fossil and mineral specimens. For the first time, they created a comprehensive physical definition of a state only haphazardly explored and described up to that time. Whitney’s self-certainly in his expertise and personal views often led to tumultuous, even self-defeating,...

Major restrictions, socioeconomic stratification, and student success

April 16, 2020

In this policy brief for the University of California Office of the President, Zachary Bleemer and Aashish Mehta present evidence suggesting that GPA major restrictions disproportionately impact underrepresented and lower-income students with less prior academic opportunity. It links those students to postgraduate outcomes to show that, in at least one comprehensive case study, pushed-out students are sharply prevented from achieving high wages or their preferred careers after graduation.