Pool Of Potential Applicants Research Articles

Effective or predatory funding? Evaluating the hidden costs of grant applications.

Researchers are spending an increasing fraction of their time on applying for funding; however, the current funding system has considerable deficiencies in reliably evaluating the merit of research proposals, despite extensive efforts on the sides of applicants, grant reviewers and decision committees. For some funding schemes, the systemic costs of the application process as a whole can even outweigh the granted resources-a phenomenon that could be considered as predatory funding. We present five recommendations to remedy this unsatisfactory situation.

Perceptions on navigating ACGME-accredited addiction psychiatry fellowship program websites: A thematic analysis across a race- and gender-diverse pool of potential applicants

Background: There is an alarming shortage of addiction psychiatrists in the United States. To promote interest in addiction psychiatry (ADP), it is essential to maximize resources available through ADP fellowship websites. The aim of this study was to investigate the perceived adequacy and accessibility of content on ADP fellowship websites and discover what further information is considered important among trainees interested in becoming addiction specialists. Methods: Three virtual focus groups were conducted between January and February 2021 among medical students and residents in diverse geographic regions. Participants were asked about the availability of information on ADP fellowship program websites and other material they would like to see available. Focus groups were recorded, with data transcribed and coded using NVivo 11 and Dedoose. A coding scheme was deductively developed based on the core research questions. Results: The majority of participants (N = 27) identified areas of dissatisfaction with the content currently available on ADP websites. The sample was highly representative of racial and ethnic minoritized trainees (n = 12) and genderqueer/non-binary participants (n = 3). Three major themes were identified and durable across all focus groups: lack of emphasis on diversity/health equity, lack of portrayal of everyday life and activities of fellows, and inadequate representation of curricula. Overwhelmingly, participants identified a dedication to health equity (for example, working with minoritized populations) as a key deciding factor in whether to apply to a particular ADP fellowship. Conclusions: ADP fellowship websites are perceived to have considerable variability in the amount and quality of information. Many do not appear to provide the full spectrum of content desired by diverse potential applicants, such as information regarding current fellows and community-centered initiatives. This is concerning, as it suggests ADP fellowships may be interfacing poorly with burgeoning leaders, especially those from race and gender minoritized backgrounds, neglecting potential opportunities to develop future addiction specialists.

Efforts to Recruit Medical Students From Rural Counties: A Model to Evaluate Recruitment Efforts.

BackgroundOver the past 40 years, the physician supply of North Carolina (NC) grew faster than the total population. However, the distribution of physicians between urban and rural areas increased, with many more physicians in urban areas. In rural counties, access to care and health disparities remain concerning. As a result, the medical school implemented pipeline programs to recruit more rural students. This study investigates the results of these recruitment efforts.MethodologyDescriptive analyses were conducted to compare the number and percentage of rural and urban students from NC who applied, interviewed, and were accepted to the University of North Carolina’s School of Medicine (UNC SOM). The likely pool of rural applicants was based on the number of college-educated 18-34-year-olds by county.ResultsRoughly 10.9% of NC’s population of college-educated 18-34-year-olds live in rural counties. Between 2017 and 2019, 9.3% (n = 225) of UNC SOM applicants were from a rural county. An increase of just 14 additional rural applicants annually would bring the proportion of rural UNC SOM applicants in alignment with the potential applicant pool in rural NC counties.ConclusionsOur model of analysis successfully calculated the impact of recruitment efforts to achieve proportional parity in the medical school class with the rural population of the state. Addressing rural physician workforce needs will require multiple strategies that affect different parts of the medical education and healthcare systems, including boosting college completion rates in rural areas. This model of analysis can also be applied to other pipeline programs to document the success of the recruitment efforts.

Gender Equity in Law School Enrollment: An Elusive Goal

Women finally make up more than half of law students nationwide, but that milestone masks significant gender inequities in law school enrollment. Women constitute an even larger percentage of the potential applicant pool: for almost two decades, they have earned more than 57% of all college degrees. As we show in this article, women are less likely than men to apply to law school — or to be admitted if they do apply. Equally troubling, women attend less prestigious law schools than men. The law schools that open the most employment doors for their graduates enroll significantly fewer women than schools with worse job outcomes and weaker access to the legal profession. We explore here the factors that may contribute to this ongoing gender gap in law school attendance. We also propose several strategies for closing the gap. Enrollment equity alone will not put women on an equal footing with men; a sizable literature probes gender biases that pervade the law school environment. Recognizing and addressing the enrollment gap in legal education, however, is an essential first step toward improving the representation of women throughout the legal profession.

What Degree Is Necessary to Lead? ARL Directors’ Perceptions

In 2018, after a failed search for the Executive Director of the American Library Association (ALA), ALA members put forth a ballot initiative to determine whether the educational requirements for the position should be modified, in part, to expand the potential applicant pool. With this research, the authors examined if current ARL administrators hold an MLS/MLIS and whether current ARL administrators felt it was necessary for library administrators to hold an MLS/MLIS. Additionally, the researchers examined ARL administrators’ perspectives regarding whether it was necessary for them to earn additional degrees to achieve their highest library administrative position, and whether they felt their degrees prepared them to be successful in the position that they currently hold.

The Northwest’s Phantom Pool

Responses gathered in a recent study of the superintendency in the Pacific Northwest suggest that less than 25% of sitting superintendents in the year 2000 were under the age of 50; and 40% of those who were 50 years or older planned to retire within the next four years. While the pool of potential applicants includes over 1,000 superintendent certificate holders, fewer than 150 of respondents in the same study planned to apply for upcoming vacancies. This article examines aspects of the position that serve as disincentives to seemingly qualified candidates and the policy ramifications of possible pool inadequacy within the given context.

Polly L. Arnold

Polly L. Arnold

Private Information and Insurance Rejections.

Across a wide set of non-group insurance markets, applicants are rejected based on observable, often high-risk, characteristics. This paper argues that private information, held by the potential applicant pool, explains rejections. I formulate this argument by developing and testing a model in which agents may have private information about their risk. I first derive a new no-trade result that theoretically explains how private information could cause rejections. I then develop a new empirical methodology to test whether this no-trade condition can explain rejections. The methodology uses subjective probability elicitations as noisy measures of agents beliefs. I apply this approach to three non-group markets: long-term care, disability, and life insurance. Consistent with the predictions of the theory, in all three settings I find significant amounts of private information held by those who would be rejected; I find generally more private information for those who would be rejected relative to those who can purchase insurance; and I show it is enough private information to explain a complete absence of trade for those who would be rejected. The results suggest private information prevents the existence of large segments of these three major insurance markets.

Preparing Newly Licensed Associate Degree Nurses to Work in Home Health Care

This article describes an innovative learning program, designed for associate degree nurse (ADN) graduates, developed at the visiting Nurse Service of New York (VNSNY) to expand its hiring pool of potential applicants to home health care nursing positions. The program, “Transitions to Home Health Care,” provides a strong emphasis on independent judgment, assessment skills, and collaboration with other professions and resources outside the home health care agency. In view of the expanding number of ADN graduates and the increasing competition for a limited number of new bachelor of science in nursing (BSN), VNSNY developed and is testing a model that combines a specially designed one-year didactic educational course and a clinical practice internship program to prepare new ADN graduates to work in the home health care field at a level more comparable to that of BSN graduates. To date, VNSNY has had preliminary success with this new approach.

Career Aspirations of Potential Applicants for Principals of Catholic Schools: An Australian Perspective

Recent surveys of leadership succession planning in Catholic schools in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania, and the Northern Territory of Australia have confirmed the growing shortage of persons applying for positions of principal in Catholic schools in those states and territory and examined reasons for the decline in numbers. This paper focuses on a particular aspect of that research in which the career aspirations of those being surveyed, in the pool of potential applicants for principal positions, are analyzed and reported. Implications for the future of Catholic schools in Australia as well as for the future leadership of schools in general are examined.

Teaching Human Gross Anatomy to the Home-Based Electronic Learner Without Cadaver Dissection (1998-2002)

Over the past decade, electronic learning (EL) has become an established method for delivering courses as many colleges and universities try to expand their pool of potential applicants and serve an aging and geographically diverse student population. To accommodate this pool of potential applicants, the East Carolina University (ECU) Department of Physician Assistant Studies started an EL curriculum to train primary health care providers. ECU faculty have previously reported on the broader aspects of teaching distance learning to the physician assistant (PA) students at home.1 Here we report our experience with teaching human gross anatomy course to PA students without cadaver dissection. From 1984 to 1997, instruction in gross anatomy for allied health students used cadaver dissection and intranet-based library multimedia tools. The gross anatomy EL course (1998) was the first course in the curriculum to be taught to the PA electronic learners. The EL gross anatomy course had two major problems to overcome. The first was, “How do we teach human gross anatomy without the ELs dissecting the cadaver?” The second challenge was, “How do we get the beginning EL students to adapt to computer-based instruction and improve their Internet skills, allowing them to succeed in an 11-week summer session course?” The second challenge was discussed by Heinan, while Winn et al addressed the issue of using the Internet to teach a subject matter by means of high definition graphics.1,2 But other problems and results specific to teaching gross anatomy to ELs were not addressed. In this article, we discuss the specific problems and results of teaching human gross anatomy—which has traditionally been a laboratory intensive course—to the home-based electronic learner. To replace the dissection lab, the PA faculty proposed using a broadband Internet-based approach to deliver the course’s educational objectives. A review of the literature showed that the inclusion of CAI in an anatomy course would probably not negatively affect the learning process and would likely permit the electronic learning students obtain course objectives in reduced time.3 But these studies involved various faceto-face teaching modalities using CAI to augment, not replace, cadaver dissection.4 Nevertheless, based on this literature, we redesigned the PA electronic learning course to extend these studies a step further—to deliver the gross anatomy course without laboratory cadaver dissection. In the first EL course for PA students, we relied heavily on the Gold Standard Multimedia Inc.—on-line dissector for gross anatomy and radiology. Several FTF courses and at least one other on-line course from other universities have used this system.4-6 We have also used the Gold Standard dissector (GSM.com) for both FTF and the EL sections. In the 2000 EL course, a series of high-resolution images for each laboratory were taken from each day’s FTF lab dissection and was

Searching, hiring and labour market conditions

This paper attempts to investigate how employers' recruitment strategies (in terms of the recruitment method used and the applicants' characteristics) change in response to different conditions on the relevant regional labour market. Our empirical results show that the hiring of unemployed candidates and the use of the public employment service are events more likely to happen in a slack regional labour market. Moreover, the use of advertisements and the hiring of already-employed job seekers are more likely to occur in the presence of excess demand on the relevant regional labour market. This supports the view that shifts in recruitment strategies may be driven by cyclical fluctuations in expected variations (in both the size and composition) of the pool of potential applicants.

From Coordinating Board to Campus

Remediation of students' deficiencies in preparation, basic skills, and foundational knowledge has been an enduring, but largely ignored, component of curricula in colleges and universities in the United States. In recent years, however, policy makers have become more aware and less accepting of this state of affairs. While analysts document the extent of remediation - one regional study found that roughly one-third of freshmen students took remedial classes at 85% of the institutions surveyed (Abraham, 1992) and a national study uncovered comparable figures, 29% of freshmen at 78% of institutions (NCES, 1996) - legislatures and state coordinating boards have begun to consider and enact policies to dictate and contain remedial education (Lively, 1993, 1995a, 1995b). From their perspective, the presence of remediation at colleges and universities has increasingly come to symbolize the failure of the nation's precollegiate educational system, the eroding standards of American colleges and universities, and an inefficient use of public resources. State higher education coordinating boards, in particular, have become the policymaking bodies that translate concerns about remediation into operational imperatives for public colleges and universities. Boards are intended to be, in Berdahl's (1971) phrase, the suitably sensitive serving to advocate institutional interests and academic values and to buffer institutions from direct political intrusion while still pointing institutions in the directions preferred by the public and state policymakers. From an institutional perspective, boards have always intruded into their independent and autonomous operation. However, observers have suggested that the structures for coordination that came to prominence in and around the 1960s have, in recent years, combined with economic and social conditions to increase system coordination and centralized control in public higher education (see, for example, Clark, 1994; Hearn & Griswold, 1994; Kerr & Gade, 1989). What may at one time have been a mediator between institutional and external interests may since have become more of a proctor and surrogate that readily passes external demands through to institutions in the form of increasingly intrusive bureaucratic control mechanisms such as policy mandates. In this vein, a board's policy dictates to institutions about remediation raise a number of troubling issues. They appear to threaten campus autonomy, limit the ability to accomplish an institutional mission, and restrict the potential applicant pool and enrollment base. First, the type of course work offered and who must take it are fundamental questions for institutions of higher education. Answers to these questions say a lot about the nature of an institution and the professional identity of the people who work in it. We typically think of questions such as what is taught, to whom, and for how much credit as matters of institutional and, more specifically, faculty prerogative. Classic statements of governance such as the AAUP/ACE/AGB (1966) Statement on Governance of Colleges and Universities, tend to consider academic issues and, in particular, curricular topics as the domain of institutional faculty. In truth, the governance of institutions is not as segmented as this statement suggests, and multiple stakeholders are involved in the many decisions arising in the normal operation of higher education institutions. Even so, dictating remediation policy from the coordinating board level can appear excessively prescriptive and preemptive of the faculty role in overseeing the curricula of institutions. Second, remediation in higher education has a proud tradition. It is one mechanism that gives real dimension to access and equal opportunity in higher education. Remedial services have been vital tools in helping GI bill, disadvantaged minority, low SES, returning adult, and handicapped students succeed in college (Clowes, 1992, pp. …

THE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON WAMI PROGRAM: 25 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE WITH MANPOWER SHORTAGES IN RURAL AREAS

ABSTRACT: The University of Washington is the only United States medical school serving the health care education needs of Washington, Alaska, Montana and Idaho (WAMI) and has evolved a unique set of partnerships to address this predominantly rural region of the United States. Three specific aspects of this program are relevant to Australia's rural health needs: (i) ‘pipeline’ efforts that groom rural and minority students long before medical school in order to keep them in the potential applicant pool; (ii) a decentralized medical school curriculum that provides repetitive training opportunities in rural and community‐based settings; and (Hi) special residency rotations, physician assistant programs and rural hospital support all of which train and maintain health care providers in rural remote settings.