Challenges of broadening access, escalating cost, maintaining desirable quality and enhancing meaningful learning experiences in African higher education (HE) have spurred debates on how to restructure higher education delivery to meet the diverse needs of heterogeneous learners and adapt pedagogical models to the educational realities of…

The Civil Rights Project was hired to identify barriers to equitable access in Buffalo (New York) Public Schools' criteria schools and propose solutions, which, if accepted by both parties, could resolve the civil rights violations and create more equitable access to those schools. The researchers found that students of color, low-income students,…

Performance funding policies allocate state appropriations to public institutions based in part on retention and completion outcomes, and equity metrics allocate additional funding for graduating historically underserved students. Through interviews of 52 college administrators and state policymakers, I explore campus responses to performance…

Relatively few students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are enrolled in the most selective American colleges and universities. To improve enrollment, scholars have suggested that college admission offices provide these low SES students an admissions advantage, also known as class-based affirmative action. This study examined to what degree…

Privileging elite academic pedigrees in graduate admissions preserves racial and socioeconomic inequities that many institutions say they wish to reduce. To understand this preference, I integrate across perspectives on trust in rational choice, social capital, and social network theories, and use the resulting framework to interpret 68 interviews…

Colorado has the second most-educated adult populace, but largely because it imports college-educated labor from other states. Almost 56 percent of Coloradans have a high-quality certificate, associate's degree, bachelor's degree, or higher. Yet at the same time Colorado has the fifth lowest high school graduation rate in the nation. The state's…

Charter schools are a popular option in school choice reform. Parents often choose to enroll their children in charter schools because they are disenchanted with traditional public schools. Many charter schools are independent from local school districts and promise to be innovative when implementing their curriculum. Despite charter schools'…

This article analyses and critiques the discourse around widening participation in elite universities in the UK. One response, from both university administrators and academics, has been to see this as an 'intractable' problem which can at best be ameliorated through outreach or marginal work in admissions policy. Another has been to reject the…

The challenges for increasing opportunities and college access for black students typically focus on the traditional barriers related to academic preparation, the racial gap in standardized test scores, and dropping out of high school. While these challenges remain, new and emerging challenges to college access are also important to discuss. They…

There is much to discuss, and debate, about the sources and effects of inequality on economic growth and social mobility, and the relationship between education and economic growth. However, an undergraduate degree from a highly selective and elite college gives students a strong advantage in gaining employment in jobs that promise greater…

Previous studies have shown that state performance funding policies do not increase baccalaureate degree production, but higher education scholarship lacks a rigorous, quantitative analysis of the unintended consequences of performance funding. In this article, we use difference-in-differences estimation with fixed effects to evaluate performance…

The debate over affirmative action policies in higher education is not so much about whether having racially and ethnically diverse college campuses is desirable, but rather about how best to achieve that worthy objective. Most universities prefer employing explicit racial preferences that allow them to recruit and admit the highest-scoring black…

This paper examines the characteristics of students admitted to Russian universities with different levels of selectivity. First, we argue that students differ not only by the results of the Unified State Exam (USE), the university entrance exam, but by family and school characteristics, and by educational strategies. Next, it is shown that the…

While previous research has focused on the continuing educational disparities between the growing Latinx population and other racial/ethnic groups, this study focuses on the importance of the assets and enrichment opportunities that determine variability in Latinx student college access. Using the nationally representative 2009-2016 High School…

The Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB) 2020 Trustee Index is the third annual survey of governing board members regarding matters imperative to the higher education sector, as well as to the colleges, universities, and multicampus systems they hold in trust. This AGB survey, conducted in collaboration with Gallup,…