This study replicates and extends a 2004 content analysis of three major higher education journals. The original study examined the methodological characteristics of all published research in these journals from 1996 to 2000, recommending that higher education programs adjust their graduate training to better match the heavily quantitative and…

This article reviews literature on the potential for understanding higher education change processes through social network analysis (SNA). In this article, the main tenets of SNA are reviewed and, in conjunction with organizational theory, are applied to higher education change to develop a set of hypotheses that can be tested in future research.

Reviewing three key areas of literature in our field (college choice, state policy, and faculty) the article identifies gaps that we can fill by reembodying and repoliticizing "choice," by which is meant moving beyond the individualized and "neutral" market logic in addressing the actions of collective entities in relation to…

Over the past two decades, state governments have increasingly invested in programs to recruit accomplished scientists from elsewhere to university positions. This event history analysis suggests that an intriguing mix of comparative state disadvantage and leveragable existing research resources is associated with the likelihood of states adopting…

Viewbooks are an important medium by which institutions of higher learning entice students to matriculate. Indeed, an entire industry exists to aid institutions in the design and production of these publications and college and university admissions and public relations professionals spend a significant amount of time and money fashioning…

The purpose of this article is to explore the effects of organizational and work-group characteristics on the socialization of new scientists. It focuses on the experiences of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in science. The authors chose to look at outcomes that reflect behaviors (early productivity) and attitudes (willingness to share…

To resolve the dispute amongst several studies, this research investigated whether the new generation of women engineering majors, who have been better academically prepared and presumably instilled with confidence, still experience lower levels of achievement than male engineering students. This study was framed under Bandura's (1986) triadic…

This article concerns the usefulness of postmodernity for illuminating change in higher education associated with the new millennium. Overarching is the notion that history is not a smooth, rational, progressive unfolding of events but a series of ruptures and fragmenting disjunctures. This article asserts that when viewed in epochal terms, the…

One of the most important changes in American higher education over the last 30 years has been the gradual shrinking of the old arts and sciences core of undergraduate education and the expansion of occupational and professional programs. Occupational fields have accounted for approximately 60% of bachelors' degrees in recent years, up from 45% in…

To examine the relationship between parental involvement and college enrollment, this study draws on the work of Bourdieu (1986), Coleman (1988), and Lin (2001a, 2001b) to conceptualize parental involvement as a form of social capital that provides individuals with access to resources that may facilitate college enrollment. The conceptual model…

Over the past four decades higher education institutions have faced increasing complexity related to governance (Berdahl, 1991; Birnbaum, 1988; Kezar, 2000; Leslie & Fretwell, 1996). In particular, institutions now face even greater competing priorities and demands to engage the community, business, and industry; to solve social problems and…

"And so a lot of times I felt out of place, because you see all white faces. You know I'm the only fly in the buttermilk, so that took some getting used to ..." These words, shared by a black student during an interview for the present study, poignantly reflect the essence of the experience of being a minority student on a predominately white…

Women continue to receive fewer doctoral and first-professional degrees than men, even though women receive more bachelor's degrees. The underrepresentation of women holds even after allowing for time to complete an advanced degree. Although researchers have examined sex and racial/ethnic group differences in undergraduate enrollment (e.g.,…

Interviewing is key to many forms of qualitative educational research; we interview respondents for oral histories, life histories, ethnographies, and case studies (see Tierney & Dilley, 2002, for an overview of interviewing in education). Despite the primacy of verbal data in qualitative research, basic introductions to qualitative research…

This article examines how tenure and academic freedom are portrayed in novels about academic life. The novel provides unique opportunities to explore philosophical questions and allows readers to examine meaning rather than truth, existence as opposed to reality. Thus, the novel suggests what is possible, which reality forecloses insofar as from a…