Beginning at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education experienced a sea of change in reduced enrollment, altered course delivery models, and increased need for student support. While observing staff's actual impact on the student experience during this time, this study will address the question, "How do professional staff in small…

This dissertation utilizes performance-based funding for higher education in Europe as the mechanism through which to interrogate broader relationships between universities and their external resource environments. Structured as three distinct journal-length articles, I first explore the emergence of performance-based funding systems for higher…

While the impact of government funding for institutions of higher education has been researched extensively, little research looks at the impact of students as a funding source. This is important because students are one of the greatest contributors to higher education budgets. Within the Commonwealth of Kentucky, there has been a decline in high…

The problem of grade inflation has become epidemic in higher education. The purpose of this research was to determine the experiences, perceptions, and interpretations of adjunct college instructors with the phenomenon of grade inflation. The researcher used a qualitative phenomenological study methodology. Twenty-three respondents participated in…

This dissertation examines performance-based funding policies in higher education. Performance-based funding policies allocate state funding via student outcomes instead of by student enrollments. The first paper in this dissertation provides an in-depth analysis of Ohio's performance-based funding policy for two-year institutions. Then, the…

This study examined the use of virtual emergency management systems within operational and tactical environments and explored the experiences of officials using these virtual systems regarding communication of information, coordination of resources, and strategic thinking throughout a critical incident at 4-year public institutions of higher…

Universities in Nigeria have historically faced underfunding, and at an operational level, compete for attracting the best pool of students, achieving the highest grades. Adequately funded universities not only ensure a higher standard of University curriculum, but also have the potential to result in competitive advantages over other…

The Economics of Education is a field that deals with an education system that is funded and administered at different levels. For example, states provide funds for public universities, schools get funding from local taxes, and experimental designs deal with different administrative levels (e.g. school, district, state). The existence of different…

The purpose of the study was to determine if the allocation of faculty salary expenditures has an influence on first-time, full time freshmen retention rates. The population for this study was all public degree granting undergraduate four-year postsecondary institutions accredited by the Southern Region Education Board in the 16 member states with…

Chapter 1: In response to tightened budgets and concerns about higher education costs, governments have introduced rules to limit the use of publicly funded aid, particularly at for-profit colleges. In this paper, we use an event study framework to estimate how tuition, enrollments, and loan use changed at for-profit colleges that became…

The challenges facing higher education are great given the current economic environment, the shift of enrollment from private to public institutions, changing student demographics, globalization of institutions, and technology (Goldstein, 2006; Jansen & Bielak, 2008; Newman, Couturier, & Scurry, 2004a). Society's expectations that…

This study examined the relationship between institutional expenditures in student services, levels of student engagement, and measures of student satisfaction across 18 (out of 19) universities in the Province of Ontario, Canada. Information regarding these variables for each institution was assembled from four extant datasets: (a) the "2006…

University mental health clinics have experienced a marked increase in demand for services without an increase in resources to meet the rising demand. Consequently, university mental health centers need strategies to determine the best allocation of their limited resources. Transtheoretical Model, based on client motivation, may offer valuable…