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Why so many of America's public university students are not graduating—and what to do about it The United States has long been a model for accessible, affordable education, as exemplified by the country's public universities. And yet less than 60 percent of the students entering American universities today are graduating. Why is this happening, and what can be done? Crossing the Finish Line provides the most detailed exploration ever of college completion at America's public universities. This groundbreaking book sheds light on such serious issues as dropout rates linked to race, gender, and socioeconomic status. Probing graduation rates at twenty-one flagship public universities and four ...
Colleges sell themselves by the numbers—rankings, returns on investments, and top-ten lists—but these often mislead prospective students. What numbers should they really be paying attention to? High school and college students are inundated by indicators and rankings supposedly designed to help them decide where to go to college and what to study once they arrive. In Metrics That Matter, coauthors Zachary Bleemer, Mukul Kumar, Aashish Mehta, Chris Muellerleile, and Christopher Newfield take a critical look at these metrics and find that many of the most popular ones are confusing, misleading, and—most importantly—easily replaceable by more helpful alternatives. Metrics That Matter ex...
In Lifecycle Events and Their Consequences: Job Loss, Family Change, and Declines in Health, editors Kenneth A. Couch, Mary C. Daly, and Julie Zissimopoulos bring together leading scholars to study the impact of unexpected life course events on economic welfare. The contributions in this volume explore how job loss, the onset of health limitations, and changes in household structure can have a pronounced influence on individual and household well-being across the life course. Although these events are typically studied in isolation, they frequently co-occur or are otherwise interrelated. This book provides a systematic empirical overview of these sometimes uncertain events and their impact. By placing them in a unified analytical framework and approaching each of them from a similar perspective, Lifecycle Events and Their Consequences illustrates the importance of a coherent approach to thinking about the inter-relationships among these shifts. Finally, this volume aims to set the future research agenda in this important area.
How our colleges and universities can respond to the changing hopes and needs of society In recent decades, cognitive psychologists have cast new light on human development and given colleges new possibilities for helping students acquire skills and qualities that will enhance their lives and increase their contributions to society. In this landmark book, Derek Bok explores how colleges can reap the benefits of these discoveries and create a more robust undergraduate curriculum for the twenty-first century. Prior to this century, most psychologists thought that creativity, empathy, resilience, conscientiousness, and most personality traits were largely fixed by early childhood. What research...
Katherine Baird, an economist, clearly spells out how our educational system is trapped in mediocrity. She points the direction to where we need to go to get out of the trap and carefully examines each factor that has lead to the current state in education.
Addressing the disparity in test scores between black and white children remains one of the greatest social challenges of our time. Between the 1960s and 1980s, tremendous strides were made in closing the achievement gap, but that remarkable progress halted abruptly in the mid 1980s, and stagnated throughout the 1990s. How can we understand these shifting trends and their relation to escalating economic inequality? In Steady Gains and Stalled Progress, interdisciplinary experts present a groundbreaking analysis of the multifaceted reasons behind the test score gap—and the policies that hold the greatest promise for renewed progress in the future. Steady Gains and Stalled Progress shows tha...
A systematic assessment of the impact of public access to computers and the Internet, with findings from developing countries in South America, Asia, and Africa. Shared public access to computers and the Internet in developing countries is often hailed as an effective, low-cost way to share the benefits of digital technology. Yet research on the economic and social effects of public access to computers is lacking. This volume offers the first systematic assessment of the impact of shared public access in the developing world, with findings from ten countries in South America, Asia, and Africa. It provides evidence that the benefits of diversified participation in digital society go beyond pr...
State preferences for higher education spending : a panel data analysis, 1977-2001 / Michael J. Rizzo -- Do tenured and tenure-track faculty matter? / Ronald G. Ehrenberg and Liang Zhang -- The increasing use of adjunct instructors at public institutions : Are we hurting students? / Eric P. Bettinger and Bridget Terry Long -- The effect of institutional funding cuts on baccalaureate graduation rates in public higher education / Gary L. Blose, John D. Porter, and Edward C. Kokkelenberg -- The effects of a changing financial context on the University of California / Gerald R. Kissler and Ellen Switkes -- Assessing public higher education in Georgia at the start of the twenty-first century / Ch...
Poverty declined significantly in the decade after Lyndon Johnson's 1964 declaration of "War on Poverty." Dramatically increased federal funding for education and training programs, social security benefits, other income support programs, and a growing economy reduced poverty and raised expectations that income poverty could be eliminated within a generation. Yet the official poverty rate has never fallen below its 1973 level and remains higher than the rates in many other advanced economies. In this book, editors Maria Cancian and Sheldon Danziger and leading poverty researchers assess why the War on Poverty was not won and analyze the most promising strategies to reduce poverty in the twen...
What will it take to achieve President Obama’s higher education completion agenda? The United States, long considered to have the best higher education in the world, now ranks eleventh in the proportion of 25- to 34-year-olds with a college degree. As other countries have made dramatic gains in degree attainment, the U.S. has improved more slowly. In response, President Obama recently laid out a national “completion agenda” with the goal of making the U.S. the best-educated nation in the world by the year 2020. Getting to Graduation explores the reforms that we must pursue to recover a position of international leadership in higher education as well as the obstacles to those reforms. T...