Many institutions of higher education are better known for their athletics programs than their academic offerings. Should a crisis arise, athletics scandal and notoriety can threaten the future trajectory and financial health of the campus. As such, lapses in intercollegiate athletics oversight can create fractures and tensions within institutions…

In this dissertation, I examined the how honors programs and colleges serve as a tool for public universities to compete with private universities in the rankings game, as well as examining how that contributes to stratification processes. By building on the existing literatures within the organization of higher education, student experiences in…

Using archival records preserved by Iowa's community colleges, private four-year colleges, and public universities, this dissertation examines how Iowa's established higher education institutions responded to and adjusted to the "presence" of new two-year colleges from 1965 to 1975. This decade was a critical period of development for…

With the number of alumni of distance programs increasing, and the decline of public funding for higher education continuing, overlooking engaging these constituents both as active members within the alumni community and as donors will likely be progressively detrimental to institutions as time progresses. The purpose of this study was to…

This study examined the effect that striving behavior has upon an institution's expenditures. While not the first study to examine such effects, it was the first to look across a multitude of institutional types, spanning seven levels of Carnegie classifications and encompassing public and private not-for-profit bachelors-granting schools to…

This dissertation sought to provide a better understanding of early alumnus identity at a public Midwestern university. Unlike a majority of alumni studies, this study used a qualitative case study methodology to examine alumni identity among participants through the use of personal interviews. Participants were 10-11 years post graduation from…

This study operationalized Bekkers and Wiepking's (2007, 2011) eight theoretical mechanisms that drive private giving, examining them within the context of alumni donor behavior at a selected public university in the southern region of the United States. The purpose of the study was to determine if the theoretical mechanisms that drive private…

Leadership profile pages on organizational websites have become staged opportunities for impression management. This research uses content analysis to examine the strategies of assertive impression management used to construct the leadership Web presence of the 70 presidents of national public universities, as identified in the "US News and…

Literature reveals that accreditation in the United States (U.S.) is a vital component of accountability to the higher education community. However, there is limited research on accreditation, specifically on the national accreditation of teacher and educator training programs. Therefore, this study is warranted in examining the perceived value…

The purpose of this study was to identify factors that influenced college choice of students who recently enrolled (current freshmen and sophomores) in agriculture programs at Oklahoma's land-grant university, as compared to recently enrolled students (current freshmen and sophomores) in selected agriculture programs at public community colleges…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the applicability of the synergistic leadership theory (SLT) (Irby, Brown, & Duffy, 1999; Irby, Brown, Duffy, & Trautman, 2002) to Chinese and American educational leaders in 50 high-ranking public Chinese universities and 50 high-ranking public U.S. universities. Methods: This study…

I develop and structurally estimate an equilibrium model of the college market. Students, who are heterogeneous in both abilities and preferences, make college application decisions, subject to uncertainty and application costs. Colleges observe only noisy measures of student ability and set up tuition and admissions policies to compete for more…