Our paper focuses on the role that the gender composition of the leaders of American colleges and universities--trustees, presidents, and provosts--play in influencing the rate at which academic institutions diversify their faculty across gender lines. Our analyses make use of institutional level panel data that we have collected for a large…

To improve our understanding of the factors that influence persistence rates in STEM field majors, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation provided a grant to the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute in 2007 to study the question. The five papers in the symposium represent the output of the project. This introduction explains the motivation for…

During the last two decades, median instructional spending per full-time equivalent (FTE) student at American 4-year colleges and universities has grown at a slower rate than median spending per FTE student in a number of other expenditure categories, including academic support, student services and research. Our paper uses institutional level…

This study uses panel data to examine the relationship between faculty employment and external R&D expenditures at Research and Doctoral institutions over a 15-year period of time. On average, a 1% increase in the number of full-time faculty is associated with about 0.2% increase in total R&D expenditure. Further, a one percentage point increase…

Doctoral programs in the humanities and related social sciences are characterized by high attrition and long times to degree. In 1991 the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation launched the Graduate Education Initiative (GEI) to improve the quality of graduate programs and in turn reduce attrition and shorten time-to-degree. Over a 10-year period, the…

Average faculty salaries differ widely across fields at American colleges and universities and the magnitudes of these field differences in salaries have been growing over time. What is less well known, however, is that at any point in time there are wide differences in the magnitudes of field differences in faculty salaries across academic…

Multiple 2- and 4-year public institutions exist within many states in the United States. Our paper develops a methodology that can be used to help evaluate how each 2-year public institution in a state is doing in preparing those of its students who transfer to 4-year public institutions in the state to successfully complete 4-year programs.…

Explores whether benefits of attending an elite college have kept pace with rising costs. Examines whether undergraduate college quality affects probability of attending graduate school, using data on three student cohorts from two national longitudinal studies. Generally, attending an elite private college significantly increases the probability…

Describes how to employ multivariate regression models and National Research Council data (used to rank doctoral programs) to analyze how measures of program size, faculty seniority, and faculty research and doctoral-degree productivity influence subjective ratings of doctoral programs in 35 academic fields. Illustrates how to compute the effects…

Using data from the Social Security Administration's "1973 Survey of Student Beneficiaries, this paper shows that the Social Security Student Benefit Program (terminated in 1982) positively influenced recipients' selection of quality private college programs. The program also affected parents' contributions and recipients' on campus employment.…

Reanalyzes data from the classic 1966 Coleman Report. Addresses whether teacher characteristics, including verbal ability and race, influenced students'"synthetic gain scores." Findings support this hypothesis. Verbal scores mattered equally for black teachers and white teachers. Black teachers were associated with higher gain scores for black…

Uses High School and Beyond longitudinal study data to estimate extent to which school characteristics and teacher characteristics influence probability that public high school students will drop out between sophomore and senior years; and increases in nonleaving students' achievement test scores during the same two-year period. School and teacher…