This case study describes the campus context and process for successfully including community engagement language into promotion and tenure policies at Virginia Commonwealth University, a high research, urban public university. The paper also describes barriers our campus faced during the promotion and tenure policy revision process, especially…

Analysis of tuition and fees at public colleges and universities in Virginia must include a discussion of the funding received from the General Assembly. The period covered by this report represents a particularly complicated scenario that impacted not just higher education but all entities that receive general fund tax dollars in Virginia. The…

A new federal initiative calls for a College Scorecard which will include a yet to be determined measure of graduate earnings. In this paper we examine the political context that drives this initiative and examine the nascent efforts of four states to develop statewide systems to measure the labor market outcomes of higher education. We propose…

The business models under which most public universities in the U.S. operate have become unsustainable. They were put in place when state economies were stronger and there were fewer programs making competing claims on state funds. The current Great Recession has made things worse, but the unsustainability of current business models derives from…

It is not troubling, or even surprising, that the United States today faces increasing economic competition from around the world. It is easier for other nations to make up ground on the world's leader by copying more-advanced existing innovations, than it is for the leader to move forward by making new innovations. And as other nations improve…

By adding courses in math, science, English, foreign languages, and geography to their admission standards, colleges and universities in many states are fostering further fragmentation of high school curricula and forcing some schools to add class periods or short-change vocational, music, and art students. Michigan, Oregon, Colorado, and New York…

This report summarizes, institution by institution, what each of the 17 public colleges and universities in Virginia have learned from formal assessment programs in the biennium ending in 1996 and how the institutions have used that information to improve their programs. A two-page spread for each institution includes a narrative which describes…

This report on graduate education, requested by the Virginia General Assembly, was developed by a task force that included graduate students, faculty, and administrators. The task force based its work on a previous report issued by an advisory committee of chief academic officers, a review of recent literature on graduate education, and their own…

A task force was appointed by the Virginia Council of Higher Education to assess the quality of undergraduate career planning and placement and to make recommendations for the improvement of these services and activities. The report of the task force is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1 presents a short overview of Virginia's career planning…

This collection of charts, graphs, and text; part of a series describing the public colleges and universities in Virginia, are intended to examine what the faculty in Virginia's public colleges and universities do, who they are, and how they are supported, evaluated, and rewarded. In most charts, institutions are grouped by mission doctoral…

This collection of graphs and text, part of a series describing the public colleges and universities in Virginia, are intended to answer the question, "What is it like to be a student at a public college or university in Virginia?" Most graphs provide data for fall 1995 and are broken down by individual four-year institution and the…