Higher Education Administrators Research Articles

It’s Not All Smoke and Mirrors: The Role of Social Norms, Alcohol Use, and Pandemic Partying in e-Cigarette Use During COVID-19

Background E-cigarette use among college students is increasing. In the era of COVID-19, such usage is especially dangerous given that the virus can be deadly for those with impaired respiratory systems. A small but growing body of research suggests that social norms may predict e-cigarette use. However, one’s perception of e-cigarette use behaviors (descriptive norms) and approval by peers (injunctive norms) have yet to be studied in college students. The overarching purpose of this study is to determine whether descriptive and injunctive norms for e-cigarette use contribute unique variance to past 30-day e-cigarette use. Methods: Using a sample of 191 students (138 women) surveyed from introductory-level courses at a university in the northeastern United States, we explored the relationships between student demographic characteristics, alcohol use, binge drinking, COVID-19 non-compliant party attendance on and off campus, and social norms with past 30-day e-cigarette use using sequential regression. Two models were utilized to determine if descriptive and injunctive e-cigarette use norms predicted e-cigarette use after controlling for demographic characteristics in the social norms model, and above and beyond demographics and COVID-19 noncompliant party attendance, alcohol use, and binge drinking in the party behaviors model. Results: The results demonstrated that descriptive and injunctive norms for e-cigarette use significantly predicted e-cigarette use in both models, controlling for all covariates. Conclusions/Importance: Findings highlight the importance of social norms in predicting e-cigarette use during the COVID-19 pandemic, identifying areas for prevention and intervention for public health officials and higher education administrators.

The New Political Economy of the Twenty-First-Century Higher Education

I pose the problems of quality in higher education to be addressed through a bureaucratic, technology-centric and accountability-based framework. It relies heavily on quantitative, information-based and ideal institutional system of higher education. The new political economy of the twenty-first-century higher education creates the balance of power in favour of state and utilises the individual choice and market-based principle of governance. The article argues the alternative in terms of shifting the power in favour of academia. The power of academia shall be realised only if the attention is focussed both on creation as well as the purpose of knowledge in the twenty-first century. Universities need to be hermeneutic for allowing the scope of creative activity and accommodate the voices of marginalised sections. It means practical rationality should guide the academia and administrators of higher education. JEL Code: I2, I28

Book Reviews

Critical Administration in Higher Education: Negotiating Political Commitment and Managerial Practice

Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt by Elizabeth Tandy Shermer

Reviewed by: Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt by Elizabeth Tandy Shermer Camille Walsh (bio) Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt. By Elizabeth Tandy Shermer. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2021. Pp. 400. $29.95 cloth) Elizabeth Tandy Shermer's Indentured Students argues persuasively that the decisions made by politicians, lenders, and higher education administrators throughout the twentieth century have created a structure that burdens millions of people with debt they had no choice but to obtain in order to unlock opportunities otherwise cut off from them by class, race, or gender. Journeying from the troubled history of nineteenth-century land grants to the most recent pandemic pause on student loan interest, Shermer skillfully traces the policy decisions made by the federal government at each point that chose to create or constrain the capacity of higher education to operate in the service of any notion of meritocracy, culminating in federally backed loans that enriched lenders, encouraged higher tuition, and overwhelmed students. This excellent book is well-suited to all institutions, and would be particularly valuable to programs on education, twentieth-century United States history, public policy, political science, and working-class studies. This is a book that introduces memorable characters—from the poignant and all-too-familiar stories of exhausted debtors today in the opening pages, to the post-WWII GI's who astonished both politicians and university presidents by enrolling in higher education in droves after the war, to the wealthy Claiborne Pell whose name one of the few direct aid programs created by the government would bear. This is the first comprehensive history of how the decades-long determination by both the government and schools to avoid substantively funding higher education access for all led to the creation of [End Page 343] loan instruments that offered a windfall of profits to lenders and enabled colleges to grow rapidly by expanding tuition in response to expanded loan "aid." These windfalls for lenders and institutions came at the cost of interest penalties and long-term uncancellable debt as the price of entry to higher education for needy students. But the system also enabled politicians to continue claiming they were against "handouts," calmed the fears of many higher education officials who believed direct funding would inhibit academic freedom and increased access would diminish standards, and placated white southerners who worried that greater financial access to college would undermine segregation. Shermer draws from newspapers, speeches, presidential papers, letters, broadcasts, magazines, legislative debates, university and educational organization archives, and military reports, along with an extensive array of scholarly, nonprofit, and government sources. The book's rich research material is organized largely chronologically, centered on the key policy shifts or debates in a particular era. One of Shermer's most fascinating (and often disturbing) through-lines is the consistent response of those in gatekeeping positions—university officials and politicians in particular, who all, of course, benefited from their own past access to education—to the equally consistent desire of those most disadvantaged by race, gender, and class to access education and improve their futures. These gatekeepers, Shermer shows, simply did not believe that education was or should ever be for the people, or that it was a public good from which society would benefit. One elite university president, confronted with the idea that GIs would soon receive funding for college because of the "unworkable" idea that the income of parents should not correlate with the education of a citizen, lamented that schools would soon be "converted into educational hobo jungles" (p. 96). As Shermer clearly illustrates, we err if we imagine that student loans have created an actual safety net in a nation with almost no others. Instead, she argues, this structure of federally guaranteed loans was intentionally created by policymakers trying to contort their way [End Page 344] out of directly funding both students and schools with a real federal safety net. Along with lenders and colleges, they built a system that preys upon students, largely students of color and particularly women, while enriching banks and keeping institutions of higher education dancing to the tune of tuition-dependent learning. Far from remedying inequality...

“My Entire World Stopped”: College Students’ Psychosocial and Academic Frustrations during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted normalcy for college attending young adults which resulted in a loss of the campus environment and classroom setting. This change in setting may interfere with a student’s personal and academic wellbeing. This study used an online survey to evaluate college students’ academic and psychosocial frustrations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were collected from March–April 2020 at a land-grant university in the Appalachian region. Data were available from 2643 undergraduate and graduate students. There was a 65.8% and 15.7% increase in the number of students who reported their learning and health as fair, poor, or very poor after the COVID-19 pandemic, respectively. Qualitative responses were coded and 8 themes and 24 subthemes emerged. College students expressed frustrations regarding technology, classwork, research, family, social, emotional, behavioral, and financial aspects of life. These results can be used by higher education administration, faculty, and staff when planning for online courses. Ensuring that student frustrations and barriers to success are recognized and considered may help prevent students departing from higher education during this time.

Early trauma and psychosocial outcomes among college students

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) such as physical abuse and family dysfunction are associated with long-term health outcomes. Even so, research on the link between ACEs and psychosocial outcomes is relatively underdeveloped. The present study sought to understand the relationship between ACEs, stress, social support, and mental health. 722 college students attending three universities located within the Midwestern and Southern United States completed self-report surveys related to their history of ACEs and current stress, social support, and mental health. Using ordinary least squares regression, we explored the relationship between ACES and psychosocial outcomes. We found an increasing number of ACEs to significantly predict stress, social support, and mental health. We further explored the relationship between each ACE and the outcomes of interest, observing emotional neglect, emotional abuse, and family member mental illness to have the strongest relationship with stress while emotional neglect and emotional abuse were most strongly related to social support. Higher education administrators and staff seeking to improve the mental health of their students should explore opportunities to enhance stress coping mechanisms and available social support.

Ideological and implementational spaces in Covid-era language policy and planning

The ongoing global pandemic exacerbates, but does not initiate, longstanding language policy and planning (LPP) concerns around the ways language education policies and practices sustain inequalities across linguistic and social identities. Elsewhere, I have argued there is an urgent need for language users, educators and researchers to counter those inequalities, filling up and wedging open ideological and implementational spaces for multiple languages, literacies, identities and practices to flourish in classroom, community and society. Here, using the lens of layered, scaled and interacting implementational and ideological spaces and focusing on cases of Indigenous education in the Andes and Mexico, I explore how ethnographic studies uncover intertwining LPP dynamics that might be leveraged to promote social change in the Covid heightened context of inequality. For example, potential equality and actual inequality of languages intertwine in Mexican education policy and practice to interrupt spaces for Maya language in a Yucatec Mayan Indigenous preschool, and intertwining monoglossic and heteroglossic language ideologies in the discourse of Indigenous leaders of Ecuador’s bilingual intercultural education reveal tensions negotiated in the politics of Kichwa identity and language across spaces like ministry offices, bilingual classrooms or official translation workshops. Meanwhile, top-down and bottom-up LPP activities intertwining in Peruvian bilingual education are leveraged locally to create transformational spaces for Quechua youth to acquire and use their heritage language in multimodal ways, and critical and transformative LPP research paradigms intertwine in an ethnographic project examining how higher education administrators, teachers and students collaborate to create new spaces for Indigenous language learning in Diidxazá/Isthmus Zapotec classes in Oaxaca, Mexico. How might these dynamic LPP ideological and implementational spaces be leveraged to confront the ever-greater inequities wrought by Covid in Indigenous educational access and ways of speaking and being?

Furthering Education

My own PhD diploma is over a decade old, and I teach in a high school rather than a graduate program. However, I think everyone who teaches or mentors in academic settings, not just those contemplating professorial careers, stands to benefit tremendously from A Field Guide to Grad School. In this sagacious yet plainspoken book, sociologist Jessica Calarco gives the gift of expert, culturally critical mentoring on topics ranging from funding your graduate studies to academic publishing to being on the professorial job market.I’m intentionally positioning Calarco’s work here as gift, and you and/or your students will, too. Like many PhD students, I experienced teaching and mentoring in graduate school that was at times unclear, at times combative, and nearly always operating under the assumption I held knowledge I didn’t yet have. A copy of this book, at the start of my academic career, would have gifted me valuable clarity on institutional norms, perspective on difficult interpersonal situations, and language to describe why I (a student from a low-income family with no academic ties) so often felt bewildered and blundering. It’s clear this book aims to serve students, particularly those with marginalized-in-the-academy identities and backgrounds, as they navigate their graduate studies. But, as her last pages make clear, Calarco’s bigger motive is empowering early-career scholars to change the broken systems that created the market for her book in the first place.Chapter by chapter, A Field Guide to Grad School adroitly unpacks the knowledge and skills – from applying to and selecting a program to navigating the job market and balancing work/life as an early-career professor – that graduate students must develop in order to thrive. Calarco is a sociologist, not a biologist, but even portions of the book that skew specific to that field are rich and informative for those in science, education, or both. I am particularly in awe of Calarco’s breakdown of academic writing genres (research reports, focused literature reviews, etc.) into idea-by-idea outlines that center universal practices like argumentation or positioning yourself in meaningful conversation with literature in your field. You and/or your students will also appreciate practical features like the timetable for how long each segment of an academic talk/lecture should take, the appendix containing snapshots of Calarco’s CV as both the document and her career lengthen, and the brief but powerful introduction to backwards-planned and inclusive course design.My favorite part of this Field Guide is how it shows the reader an example of how to serve as an active accomplice in dismantling systems of elitism and oppression. As Marian Wright Edelman has said, “It’s hard to be what you can’t see.” As its subtitle suggests, this nimble and compassionate volume makes visible the hidden curriculum of graduate studies, but it also serves as a paradigm for undertaking the work of responsive education through a justice-oriented lens. Calarco’s integrated, unwavering anti-bias stance is an excellent model for those of us in positions and/or identities associated with power who are ready to learn how to pass that power equitably to others.Calarco and I live in the same Midwestern college town. Although we’ve never met, I am heartened to know that someone like her is approaching the work of mentoring early-career scholars in my hometown with such humanity, courage, and vision. Whether you are considering graduate school, supporting graduate students, or serving elsewhere in higher-education administration – or simply interested in how to make learning and mentoring more humane – A Field Guide to Grad School should be on your reading list.

Follow 5 strategies for more effective time management

If you ask a higher education administrator what their most precious resource is, they may recite common answers like skilled personnel, quality facilities, or a stable budget. But upon reflection, another answer may emerge also: time.

The Effect of Values Affirmations on Introductory College Chemistry Grades Among Women

Evidence indicates that value affirmations can reduce the achievement gap in science classrooms. Self-affirmation theory suggests that interventions work with students with under-developed self-efficacy and that self-affirmation repairs this negative effect. An exploratory sequential mixed methods design involving text analysis software was used to investigate linguistic differences of 1,414 students in an introductory chemistry course who participated in a value affirmations intervention. Using exploratory factor analysis and Key Words in Context (KWIC), results indicated statistically significant differences within grade categories for high-achieving women in the treatment group. For these high-achieving women, reflecting on close relationships might mitigate the effect of environmental threats, rather than merely belonging to social groups. These findings have relevance in the decision-making for administrators in higher education.

BCS : Blockchain Smart Curriculum System for Verification Student Accreditation

The main objective of Higher Education is to prepare students who have academic abilities in developing knowledge and intellectual development of students to prepare technology to enter the world of work. The linkage of higher education and employment is the reason why the services provided by educational institutions direct opportunities for students to find work, because the current job market places more emphasis on the educated workforce. Therefore, tertiary institutions must have a good curriculum structure, requiring students to be productive, creative and innovative individuals who aim to form character students with the level of expertise required by the world of work. This study presents a work funded by the European Union, namely the Qualichain research project which aims to test the quality of education with the labor market related to Blockchain technology. The aim of this research is to develop a Qualichain platform that will offer educational qualifications that focus on the potential of Blockchain technology and perform data analysis to support the curriculum optimization process. This Quanlichain platform will prove its implementation that there are four pilot cases that have their respective differences. Therefore the research is focused on optimizing the administration of higher education through data developed with algorithmic and semantic techniques to support decision making that will be applied in tertiary institutions.

Transgender Graduate Students: Considerations, Tensions, and Decisions in Choosing a Graduate Program

ABSTRACT This study explored how 30 trans graduate students made decisions regarding graduate school. Specifically, it examined how the students chose their graduate program and, secondarily, how they chose their field, what led them to apply to graduate school, and their outness during the application process. In selecting a program, participants considered contextual and personal factors that encompassed commonly cited academic and pragmatic circumstances (e.g., reputation; cost) and factors salient to their gender identity, including state and university climate. Participants identified a number of tensions in choosing a program (e.g., whether to prioritize academic factors over program climate)—although some could not prioritize program climate because their field (e.g., STEM) was not LGBTQ savvy. In applying to graduate school, participants weighed the benefits of being out as trans (e.g., authenticity; finding a “good fit”) and risks (e.g., discrimination). Findings have implications for higher education administrators, career counselors, clinicians, and researchers.

Exploring Dog-Assisted Interventions in Higher Education: Students' Attitudes and Perceived Effects on Well-Being.

Both, in the transition to university and during it, students experience a multitude of different changes. Thus, it is no surprise that many students in higher education report suffering from mental health problems. To address their concerns, animal-assisted interventions (AAIs) have gained more and more attention over the past few years. Nonetheless, AAIs have neither yet been used nor researched at German universities. Two studies were carried out to address this issue. In Study I, 709 university students answered a questionnaire evaluating their attitude towards dogs, AAIs and interest in its use at their home university. In Study II, 27 students participated in a dog-assisted intervention (DAI) in which they were allowed to interact with a qualified dog for 15 min. To gain information about their well-being, blood pressure was measured and the Basler Befindlichkeitsskala had to be answered before and after the intervention. Results showed a positive attitude among German students toward dogs, AAIs, and the use of DAIs at their home university. Although an effect on physical well-being could not be found, results showed that a 15-min DAI can improve students’ psychological well-being. Thus, higher education administrators should consider using DAIs as a way to improve student well-being.

Methodological Process to Select, Develop, and Execute a Chemical Experiment for an Innovative Extension Project: Connecting Technological Research to Basic Education

1000 Future Scientists (1000FSc) is a university extension project developed at the Department of Chemistry in Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). Conducted by the Higher Education Administrative Technicians and Professors, it presents the university to the community by proposing an engaging experience for elementary and high school students. In this work, we discuss the process to develop chemical experiments for the 1000FSc project. This process aims to show how innovative technological research in chemistry can be applied to solve social problems, after being adequately adapted to laboratory experiments. Since laboratory practical science lessons are not a reality in the majority of Brazilian public schools, the 1000FSc project allows sharing the UFMG laboratory infrastructure with these students. Simultaneously, undergraduate and graduate students work as volunteers and are engaged in this production process that is a valuable contribution to their extension experience.

Time: The ever‐elusive resource of a higher education administrator

If you ask a university administrator what their most precious resource is, they may recite common answers like skilled personnel, quality facilities, or a stable budget. But upon reflection, another answer may emerge also: time.

Students’ perspectives on quality of engineering education in India

It is widely held that engineering education in India has expanded massively at the cost of quality, quality being perceived in terms of, inter alia, ranking of institutions in the national and global university ranking systems, and employability and attributes of graduates. Evidence on these aspects is based on the perspectives of the policy makers, administrators in higher education and employers in the labour market. Rarely the students’ perspectives on quality of their education are considered in formulating these conclusions. Assuming that students’ perceptions on the quality of education, which may differ from prevailing perceptions of the others, are important and they need to be paid attention to in research and policy making, the attempt in this study is to examine this aspect and fill the gap in research to some extent. Based on a survey of about 7,000 students enrolled in undergraduate engineering studies in 48 public and private institutions in four major states in India, this article presents a contrasting perspective on quality of engineering education in India. The findings are indeed perplexing, as a majority of students are ‘satisfied’ with the quality of education in their institutions, and they are well prepared for the world of work in India or abroad, and/or for further education. These findings will compel the researchers to widen their approach to study quality-related problems of higher education in India, and administrators and policy makers to rethink on their perspectives and associated actions.

Time: The ever‐elusive resource of a higher education administrator

If you ask a university administrator what their most precious resource is, they may recite common answers like skilled personnel, quality facilities, or a stable budget. But upon reflection, another answer may emerge also: time.

Yükseköğretimin Yönetimi

With the globalizing world, the responsibilities assigned to the managerial position, which is already affected by many factors, are increasing day by day. Especially in higher education institutions, which are the most exposed to marketization with the effect of the globalizing world, the management area of ​​managers is expanding. The book titled "Management of Higher Education" written by Prof. Dr. Cevat CELEP and Tijen TÜLÜBAŞ becomes important precisely at this point, as it touches on different points in the management of higher education. The book "Management of Higher Education" examines the roles that have gained importance in higher education administration from a comprehensive and diverse perspective.

Instructional Designers as “First Responders” Helping Faculty Teach in the Coronavirus Crisis

Many higher education institutions in the United States had to implement a strategy of rapid pivoting from face-to-face to online learning in response to the Spring 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic. Face-to-face learning posed a high risk of uncontrolled widespread of the virus, thus, classes had to switch rapidly to a remote mode of instruction that leveraged online learning technologies. The rapid pivoting from face-to-face to online learning posed unprecedented challenges. It is widely accepted among the communities of instructional designers, educators who teach online, and higher education administrators that designing online courses requires more than mirroring face-to-face courses in the online environment (Watson et al., 2017). Instructional strategies adopted in face-to-face instruction are not as effective in online learning environments as research has shown (Baldwin et al., 2018), and as students have remarked[1]. The application of instructional strategies tailored for online learning ensures meaningful learning experiences (Watson et al., 2017); thus, a quality online learning experience. For example, quality online learning experiences do not require weekly meetings as students live in different time zones and adopt an asynchronous approach to learning to ensure flexible and equitable access to course materials. However, providing faculty support for the rapid pivot from face-to-face to online learning with limited time and instructional design resources is uncharted territory. Faculty and instructional designers were challenged to support quality learning experiences through online course design in less than two weeks at many campuses across the country.

Perceived fairness of faculty governance: a study of 51 countries

The present research considers the possibility that guidelines emphasizing academic freedom and faculty self-governance (i.e., those articulated by AAUP and UNESCO) might compete against national norms in shaping faculty fairness perceptions of institutional policies. We investigate the extent to which expectations of academic freedom and faculty self-governance are universal across countries. Grounding our hypotheses in tenets of organizational justice, we assess faculty’s perceptions of academic freedom, hiring, tenure/contract renewal, promotion, and performance appraisal policies. Survey data were collected from 954 faculty members working at institutions of higher education in 51 countries. Results suggest that institutional policies that comply with academic freedom and faculty self-governance guidelines are perceived as fairer than policies that do not comply. Furthermore, the strength of the relationships between fairness and academic freedom, promotion, and performance appraisal policies does not differ between countries. However, our findings do indicate country-level differences in the strength of the relationship between fairness and policies regarding hiring and tenure/contract renewal. We discuss the implications of our findings for university policy. Balancing adherence to fair employment practices, respecting academic freedom, and honoring cultural norms require institutes of higher education worldwide to make difficult decisions. Our research suggests that when designing policies and practices related to the recruitment, hiring, and promotion of faculty, higher education administrators consider the expectations of academic freedom and faculty self-governance.