As we work and study in our increasingly globalized society, there is a growing trend of Chinese piano students choosing to pursue their higher education in the United States. Elite music institutions in America are also seeking and recruiting a large number of Chinese pianists. This trend raises questions regarding the similarities and…

The admissions process used today in America's most selective colleges and universities is a classic case of interest group politics gone awry. Nobody champions or fights for smart, low-income students. The result is an admissions process reduced to a series of "preferences." Taken together with other widely-used admissions practices,…

This piece of research project has demonstrated that there is a gap in educational achievement between parents' access to social capital and children's educational outcomes in a global context by examining England, United States and China specifically. Through examining educational resources, from in-school factors, such as facilities, teacher…

The population of students of color has grown threefold, and there are more than 40 cultural and social student affinity groups. More impressive, the graduation rate for African American, Latino, and Native students has increased by 13 percentage points in the last decade. In this brief, the authors dig into a decade's worth of data on four-year…

The past two decades have seen the idea of internationalization move into the mainstream of higher education policy and practice, on a global scale. In countries like the US and UK however, higher education is widely perceived as a hierarchical field, where high- and low-status universities are differentiated from one another: serving different…

Increasing the effectiveness of two- to four-year college transfer is critical for meeting national goals for college attainment and promoting upward social mobility. Efforts to improve institutional effectiveness in serving transfer students and state transfer policy have been hampered by a lack of comparable metrics for measuring transfer…

About 16 percent of veterans use the GI Bill to attend private institutions, roughly the same proportion as students generally. But at the most highly selective colleges, veterans using the Post-9/11 GI Bill barely fill a single classroom--38 at Penn, 22 at Cornell, and at Princeton, just one. The sparse numbers do not go unnoticed, veterans say.…

The author reports on a Supreme Court case that is echoing across the University of Texas at Austin, and for some students, it is personal. Not long after the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Abigail Fisher's case against the University of Texas at Austin, a lighthearted joke made the rounds at the Warfield Center for African and African-American…

Three million students in the United States are classified as gifted, yet little is known about the effectiveness of traditional gifted and talented (G&T) programs. In theory, G&T programs might help high-achieving students because they group them with other high achievers and typically offer specially trained teachers and a more advanced…

Women represent an increasingly large majority of undergraduate students, currently comprising 57% of total U.S. undergraduate enrollment. To address this gap between women and men undergraduates, some institutions have developed admissions policies to yield more men. This study examines the key issues the U.S. Supreme Court might use when…

Time to completion of the baccalaureate degree has increased markedly in the United States over the last three decades, even as the wage premium for college graduates has continued to rise. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of the High School Class of 1972 and the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988, we show that the…

The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) documents dimensions of quality in undergraduate education and provides information and assistance to colleges, universities, and other organizations to improve student learning. Its primary activity is annually surveying college students to assess the extent to which they engage in educational…

This study examines the differential effects on student subgroups of using the ACT® College Readiness Assessment Composite (ACTC) score and high school grade point average (HSGPA) for making admission decisions. The subgroup characteristics investigated include race/ethnicity, gender, and income. For each student subgroup, we examine the effect of…

President Barack Obama has called for the United States to reclaim its position as the nation with the highest concentration of adults with postsecondary degrees in the world. Given the changing demographics of the United States, this target cannot be achieved without increasing the rate at which Hispanic students obtain a college degree. In this…

Despite the precedent established in the "University of California Board of Regents v. Bakke," that race may be used as a factor in admissions policies at state institutions of higher education, state and federal court decisions were divided over whether the use of race in admissions decisions was a violation of the Equal Protection…