Two-year public colleges educate more than 50% of all U.S. undergraduates, yet graduation rates (29%) fall far below their 4-year counterparts (63%). It is critical for students of 2-year public institutions that their faculty have the appropriate knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) to effectively guide students toward graduation. This study…

Google Scholar and academic library discovery systems are both popular resources among academic users for finding scholarly information. By conducting an online survey with 975 users from more than 20 public research universities across the United States, this study comparatively investigates how and why academic users use these two resources.…

We use data from 2015-2016 to document faculty representation and wage gaps by race-ethnicity and gender in six fields at selective public universities. Consistent with widely available information, Black, Hispanic, and female professors are underrepresented and White and Asian professors are overrepresented in our data. Disadvantaged minority and…

Purpose: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Next Generation Courseware Challenge (NGCC) in 2014 to address the limited availability of affordable, high-quality adaptive courseware to postsecondary students. SRI International was retained to evaluate the NGCC initiative as a whole and to conduct impact studies for the NGCC…

Advanced education contributes to greater individual and regional prosperity, including increased earnings, improved economic growth, greater levels of community engagement and improved health outcomes. Rising costs to students and families combined with a student body that may require additional resources to ensure its success, however, may make…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to investigate the similarity between the human resource strategies (benefits, due process, employee participation, employee skill level, general training, job enrichment, social interactions, wages) currently utilized at a private, nonprofit university in Virginia, and those reported in the research…

One of the ways public colleges and universities are adjusting to changing financial circumstances is by hiring more part-time faculty and teaching/research assistants than full-time faculty. The possible long-term effects of this change should be watched closely by campus and state leaders. Several cost factors have triggered the trend:…

In the first decade of the 21st century, the nation, the states, and colleges and universities began to grapple with the challenges of globalization, changing demography, the implications of the digital era, and of a less expansive public sector. Although not a transformative period for higher education, the decade saw significant innovations in…

To determine where given Virginia institutions of higher education stand in the aggregate regarding administrators' salaries among similar institutions, salary information provided by chief academic officers of eight senior public-supported institutions in Virginia for their administrative faculty was compared with data from other United States…

The study investigated the pervasiveness of administrator and faculty involvement in, understanding of, and support for outcomes assessment in Virginia's public colleges and universities and explored critical factors influencing administrator and faculty support of outcomes assessment. Data were collected through mailed questionnaires and…

In a lawsuit brought by six Virginia public university professors, a federal district court ruled that access to Internet material for academic purposes was a matter of public concern and that plaintiffs' interest in that material outweighed the state's regulating interests. The Fourth Circuit's reversal gave the state extensive authority over…

This book contains 19 papers describing the implementation of Total Quality Management in a variety of higher education settings. Following a Foreword by Peter Likins and a Preface by Daniel J. Julius, the chapter titles and authors are: (1) "TQM: Implications for Higher Education--A Look Back to the Future" (Allan M. Hoffman and Randall…

This report responds to the 1992 Virginia legislative direction and offers suggestions on how the state's colleges and universities should change their resource allocations to extend the reach of teaching faculty and develop new and creative approaches to the work of teaching, research, and service. Restructuring in the areas of staffing…

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…

Public higher educational institutions, where about 80 percent of all college students and 65 percent of all four-year college students are educated, appear to be in serious trouble. In order to delve more deeply into this topic, the author invited a wide-ranging team of experts to examine changes in public higher education over the last quarter…