United States (US) immigration policies have increasingly focused on national security resulting in universities experiencing declines in international student applications, constraints on international scholar employment, and complications facilitating international research collaborations. The COVID-19 pandemic brought additional travel…

Bribery is a complex and critical issue in higher education (HE), causing severe economic and societal harm. Traditionally, most scholarship on HE corruption has focused on institutional factors in developing countries and insights into the psychological and motivational factors that drive HE bribery on the micro-level mechanisms are virtually…

We use survey data from three four-year campuses to explore the relationship between academic validation and student outcomes during students' first 3 years in college using structural equation modeling. We examine both a psychosocial outcome (mattering to campus) and an academic outcome (cumulative GPA). We find that both frequency of…

Recent research conducted at numerous universities has found evidence of instructor-gender differences in student evaluations of teaching (SET). This paper examines whether such gender effects exist in "instructor overall" ratings within a database of SET that includes almost 600,000 observations from the past 11 years for the Faculty of…

The degree to which students hold "epistemically unwarranted beliefs," beliefs not founded on reliable reasoning or credible data, can be used as a measure of critical thinking skills. To this end, college students (n = 806) were surveyed at the beginning and end of a semester. Epistemically unwarranted beliefs were pervasive. Several…

Colleges and universities offer classes that meet for different lengths of time and different numbers of days per week, such as classes that meet 2 days and those that meet 3 days. Traditionally triweekly classes that met for a shorter duration were more common than classes that met biweekly for a longer duration. Biweekly classes are becoming…

In recent years many universities switched from paper- to online-based student evaluation of teaching (SET) without knowing the consequences for data quality. Based on a series of three consecutive field experiments--a split-half design, twin courses, and pre-post-measurements--this paper examines the effects of survey mode on SET. First, all…

Graduation rates (GRs) remain one of the most frequently applied measures of institutional performance. This paper analyzes the relationship between university characteristics and GRs in Spain, using a dataset for the entire public university system over the period 1998-2008. Since we observe the same university over several years, we address the…

This experimental study concerned the effects of repeated students' evaluations of teaching coupled with collaborative consultation on professors' instructional skills. Twenty-five psychology professors from a Dutch university were randomly assigned to either a control group or an experimental group. During their course, students evaluated them…

Using multilevel models, this study examined "whether" and "why" the strength of association between student-faculty interaction and student cognitive skills development varies across academic majors. The study utilized data from the 2008 University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES) and a sample of 43,014…

This study examines student responses to the question, "What circumstances, if any, could make cheating justified?" It then assesses how well those responses can be classified by existing theories and categories that emerge from a qualitative analysis of the data. Results show considerable support for techniques of neutralization, partial support…

Higher education administrators believe that revenues are linked to college rankings and act accordingly, particularly those at research universities. Although rankings are clearly influential for many schools and colleges, this fundamental assumption has yet to be tested empirically. Drawing on data from multiple resource providers in higher…

We sought to develop and psychometrically describe three new student engagement scales to measure college students' engagement with their faculty (student-faculty engagement: SFE), community-based activities (CBA), and transformational learning opportunities (TLO) using items selected from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), a widely…

This study examines variability in the extent to which faculty members in the disciplinary-based academic environments of Holland's theory emphasize different student learning outcomes in their classes and whether such differences are comparable for those in "consistent" versus "inconsistent" environments. The findings show wide variation in the…

The community college has historically functioned as a primary access point to postsecondary education for Latino students. This study, an investigation conducted through an analysis of the Transfer and Retention of Urban Community College Students (TRUCCS) project, focuses on Latino students enrolled in urban "minority-majority" community…