Public Higher Education System Research Articles

COMMUNITY COLLEGES IN MASSACHUSETTS

The Massachusetts Public System of higher education is composed of 29 public colleges and universities . These institutions were established to ensure educational opportunities of high quality that are geographically accessible , affordable , and convenient . Public colleges and universities have strong academic programs and are accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges . Strategically located throughout nearly all regions of the state , these institutions serve the needs of the population and are accessible to everyone in the commonwealth . To make education more affordable , tuition at public colleges and universities is set at reasonable levels , and financial aid programs are available to help needy students . Diversity in the system is assured through its 15 community colleges , 7 comprehensive state colleges , 2 specialized professional colleges , and 5 university campuses . Community colleges are comprehensive two - year institutions located in many regions of the state . These institutions offer associate degrees in arts , sciences and applied sciences , as well as an array of certificate programs that prepare students for transfer to four - year colleges and universities and for employment in a vocation .

COMMUNITY COLLEGE OF RHODE ISLAND

Community College of Rhode Island , ( CCRI ) the only community college in the state , is part of a three - college public higher education system . With an enrollment of 15 , 000 students , CCRI is the largest public , two - year , associate degree granting college in New England . The college offers career , technical and academic program offerings as well as non - credit courses and short term job training at campuses in Warwick , Lincoln and Providence and in satellite facilities across the state . As the college looks toward the millennium , CCRI is channeling its efforts into four priority areas: to expand the use of available technology; to assume an expanded and appropriate role in responding to the needs of the business community and strengthening the economy of the state; to move toward becoming a more student centered organization; and to position the college as an increasingly attractive first - stop option for high school graduates pursuing a Baccalaureate degree .

Centralization and diversity: Evaluating the effects of government policies in U.S.A. and Dutch higher education

The article details a comparative study of higher education policies in the U.S.A. and The Netherlands. The policies are similar in their attempt to centralize the governance of public higher education in state and national systems in an attempt to promote and maintain diversity. The authors examine the policies in the context of previous research on higher education and provide data that shed light on the growth of degree programmes within public universities. Findings show that public higher education systems in several U.S.A. states and The Netherlands have not grown less diverse over time. Other findings provide mixed support for the argument that centralization is an effective means of limiting homogeneous growth in public systems of higher education.

Enrollment Management in a Statewide System of Public Higher Education: A Case Study

AbstractThe strategies employed by a large system of public higher education to plan for a downsizing and future upsizing in enrollments are outlined.

CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY COLLEGES

The California community colleges are among the nation's oldest and largest. This article describes their origins, major events in their development, and possible future prospects. Having begun as Grades 13 and 14 in unified school districts, they were declared an integral part of California's tripartite system of public higher education in the 1960 Master Plan for California Higher Education. In 1968, they were removed from the jurisdiction of the State Board ofEducation and placed under a new appointed board of governors for the community colleges, with its own chancellor and staff – not as a system of colleges, but with a still‐evolving process of shared governance with locally elected trustees, district and college administrators, faculty, students, and others. Transfer and occupational education persist as dominant functions, with remediation, basic skills development, and English as a second language for the colleges' ever more diversified student body. The colleges' already broad vocational‐technical education mission may expand in both scope and magnitude in the future, in response to federal proposals for changes in both welfare and job training programs.

Response to Rome Hartman

Rome Hartman can rest easy. No student was shortchanged, and student teaching evaluations continue to rank me as excel lent. The research and writing of my essay was conducted during the summer months when I do not teach and for which I receive no salary. What troubles me in Hartman 's flippant remark, however, is the tacit assumption that the professoriate should go on with business as usual while standards of academic freedom are imperilled, when tenure is in jeopardy, and when our conditions of employment are deteriorat ing to the point that we cannot serve our students well. Not to write and speak out about these dangerous trends would be both professionally and ethically irresponsible. To be sure, I used the Get Real segment as a frame for my defense of tenure. That said, let me be clear that my essay was never intended as an attack on either Lesley Stahl or 60 Minutes, both of which have performed heroic service in uncovering news stories of major impor tance. As the essay indicated, my underlying concern was with the right wing's successful campaign to capture the public conversation over education in general and to undermine public confidence in higher education specifically. As a result, even a distinguished 60 Minutes investigative team appeared to accept simplistic and inherendy inaccu rate explanations for the problems now plaguing academe. But the real purpose of my essay was to alert readers to a far more disturbing story. The story that needs to be reported is the story of the steady dismanding of this nation's public higher education system through underfunding and defunding. Let me give you some sense of what that means?not in statistics but in human terms: Each year, I encounter more and more undergraduates who are holding down thirty to forty hour per week jobs. In some cases, these are the brightest students in the class, but too often they are overwhelmed by exhaustion and do not consistendy perform to their capacities. These students are neither foolhardy nor greedy. They are poor. And they are the victims of policies that, since 1980, cut federal student aid and effectively eroded the nation's commitment to equalizing access to higher education. Nowa days, according to a special report in the Chronicle of Higher Education, of the approximately $35 billion that the government spends each year on

The Future of the Land Grant University System

Since 1980, incremental state and national policy decisions concerning public higher education have had a variety of effects on students and institutions. Although there has been very little research, most of these effects appear to be detrimental to the health of the system of public higher education and to the nation's stock of human capital. A thorough economic analysis of the effects of policy changes on public higher education is needed to guide the system into the 21st century.

Is Higher Education Desegregation a Remedy for Segregation but not Educational Inequality?: A Study of the Ayers v. Mabus Desegregation Case

The Supreme Court has recently been asked to rule if the state of Mississippi has met the freedom of choice standard used to determine whether or not to end a state's obligation to enact affirmative measures to undo the effects and vestiges of racial inequality brought about by segregation in public systems of higher education. In previous court rulings (Ayers I, 1987; Ayers III, 1990) the state has prevailed in arguing that it has ceased discriminatory enrollment practices at its public institutions of higher education and that Blacks are no longer restricted to racially defined schools. Blacks and Whites currently attend and are employed in all eight schools in Mississippi's public institutions of higher learning (IHL) system, which includes its three formerly all-Black colleges (Alcorn State University, Jackson State University, and Mississippi Valley State University) and its five formerly all-White colleges (University of Mississippi, University of Southern Mississippi, Mississippi State University, Delta State University, and Mississippi University for Women). The state further contends that because it has adopted race-neutral policies and procedures that give all college-bound students, Black and White, unfettered freedom of choice, its public system of higher education is now desegregated. The overriding argument is that freedom of choice constitutes equal opportunity. In higher education students do choose their schools, and enrollment in a specific college (or any college at all) is not required by the state. However, the presence of freedom of choice has long been denied as evidence of satisfactorily remedying segregation in public schools. In 1976 the state of Mississippi was sued by Ayers, the Black plaintiff, for operating a separate and unequal system of higher education. The case was tried in the northern district court of Mississippi in 1987. At that time, the judge ruled that the state had fulfilled its duty to create a free-choice, race-neutral system. The decision was reversed by a three-

Public Policy and College Opportunity

As higher education has expanded and become far more important economically, there has been increasing scrutiny of the effect of college policies on full access and equal treatment for women, minorities, and students from lower-income families. Colleges and federal and state officials have been raising costs rapidly while substantially reducing the adequacy of scholarship assistance, and those policies have limited access. Decisions about the structure of public higher-education systems, particularly their reliance on community colleges to provide wide access, appear to have far-reaching social effects. This article calls for a stronger research agenda explicitly focusing on social effects of policies and considering a broader array of educational approaches.

Participants Assess the Louisiana Consent Decree

W illiam B. Reynolds, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the U.S. Justice Department in 1983, suggested in a speech that year that the Louisiana Consent Decree (LCD) exemplified the Reagan administration's record in enforcing civil rights statutes that apply to higher education. According to Reynolds, Louisiana entered into an amicable agreement to preserve Black institutions rather than discontinuing them or merging them with White colleges (Reynolds, 1983). Signed into effect in 1981 and continuing through 1987, the LCD aims to insure that Louisiana's system of public higher education is operated on a unitary basis. It provides for crossenrollments of students of nearby predominantly Black and predominantly White schools and works to strengthen Black colleges, though it pulls back from previous efforts to force mass integration of faculties and student bodies. Given the LCD'S expiration date in 1987, evaluations of its impact recently began.

Have College Desegregation Policies Threatened Black Student Enrollment and Black Colleges?--An Empirical Analysis

Desegregation and equality of opportunity for students in higher education were greatly encouraged by the 1965 Higher Education Act and the 1973 Adams decision.1 The Higher Education Act made available the Basic Education Opportunity Grant (BEOG) and a variety of other financial aid programs for disadvantaged students. These programs greatly increased minority enrollment in U.S. colleges and universities. In 1970, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) filed a complaint that the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) was not enforcing Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act against states that operated dual, segregated public systems of higher education. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits the allocation of Federal funds to segregated public schools. In July 1977, after extensive legal debate, court guidelines were formulated that required defaulting states to submit desegregation plans in compliance with Title VI and other guidelines specified in Adams. Various features of the Adams plan have been criticized. For

Income redistribution from public higher education finance within relevant age cohorts

Most state and local government programs can be viewed as a series of transfers of purchasing power among individuals and classes, and much attention has been given during the last decade to the income redistributional impact of state higher education provision. A particularly controversial study by Hansen and Weisbrod concluded that California's system of public higher education tended to redistribute income from lower to higher income families in the 1960s. Subsequent studies have criticized the Hansen-Weisbrod approach for, among other things, ignoring the intergenerational nature of the benefit transfer resulting from state subsidies to higher education. This study demonstrates for the state of New York that, although the intergenerational criticism is a valid one, most previous studies have not properly eliminated the distortions. The study finds considerable income redistribution toward lower income classes within the college-age age cohort resulting from New York State's financing of higher education.

Local Income Generation and Regional Income Redistribution in a System of Public Higher Education

In the past fifteen years or so considerable attention has been focused on the application of regional multiplier analysis to the estimation of regional economic parameters, i.e., regional economic impacts. With some variations, two general approaches have emerged in the literature-the input-output approach and the economic base approach. It has generally been concluded that the input-output approach is more sophisticated and comprehensive, since it requires the development of a complete interindustry model. The majority of regional economic impact studies still employ the economic base approach, however, because input-output studies typically entail prohibitive costs and data problems.1 More recently, conventional regional multiplier methods have been used in the analysis of two specific questions: (1) the economic impact of public sector institutions or projects [7, 8]; and (2) the distribution of economic benefits from public programs among incidence groups [6, 1 1]. The former has often become essential in project evaluation, and the latter has received more emphasis as governmental developmental planning has emerged as a policy priority. One important outgrowth of these questions has been the recent attention given to estimating local economic impacts of institutions of higher education, fostered in large part by the American Council on Education's development in 1971 of a comprehensive methodology for estimating such impacts [3].2

Local Income Generation and Regional Income Redistribution in a System of Public Higher Education

Local Income Generation and Regional Income Redistribution in a System of Public Higher Education

The Distributional Effects of Public Higher Education in New York City

This paper is concerned with determining the effects of public higher education on the distribution of income in New York City. Distributional effects are determined by distributing the current expenditures of New York City and New York State for public higher education according to the percentage distribution of New York City and New York State taxes by income class and the percentage income distribution of students' families. This provides an estimate of the taxes paid by families in each income class to support public higher education, and the direct monetary benefits received by families in each income class from public higher education. Net benefits for each income class are obtained by subtracting total costs from total benefits for each income class. The net benefits from the public higher education system in New York City are positive for each income class below $15,000. There is a redistribution of income from the $15,000 and above income class to all income classes below $15,000. Distributional effects differ by type of college. At the community colleges, net benefits are positive for all income classes below $10,000. At the senior colleges, net benefits are also positive for the $10,000-$14,999 income class.

The Distributional Effects of Public Higher Education in New York City

This paper is concerned with determining the effects of public higher education on the distribution of income in New York City. Distributional effects are determined by distributing the current expenditures of New York City and New York State for public higher education according to the percentage distribution of New York City and New York State taxes by income class and the percentage income distribution of students' families. This provides an estimate of the taxes paid by families in each income class to support public higher education, and the direct monetary benefits received by families in each income class from public higher education. Net benefits for each income class are obtained by subtracting total costs from total benefits for each income class. The net benefits from the public higher education system in New York City are positive for each income class below $15,000. There is a redistribution of income from the $15,000 and above income class to all income classes below $15,000. Distributional effects differ by type of college. At the community colleges, net benefits are positive for all income classes below $10,000. At the senior colleges, net benefits are also positive for the $10,000-$14,999 income class.

Assessing the effects of changes in the cost of higher education to the student

This paper presents a methodology for the assessment of the effects of changes in the cost of higher education to the student on student enrollment. After the significant sources of student funds have been identified, a procedure is presented for expressing the total “expected contribution” from students as a transformed lognormal distribution of their parents' income. The procedure and its implications are illustrated with actual data from the public system of higher education in Texas.

The Use of PPBS In a Public System of Higher Education: "Is it Cost-Effective?"

This paper presents a qualitative discussion of the potential “costs” and “benefits” associated with the use of PPBS in a public system of higher education. The “costs,” both monetary and nonmoneta...

The Use of PPBS In a Public System of Higher Education: “Is it Cost-Effective?”

This paper presents a qualitative discussion of the potential “costs” and “benefits” associated with the use of PPBS in a public system of higher education. The “costs,” both monetary and nonmoneta...

Reorganização dos sistemas público e privado da educação superior no Brasil

O presente artigo tem por objetivo analisar o processo de reorganização da educação superior no Brasil na década de 1990 por meio das alterações efetivadas no campo jurídico e de seus desdobramentos nas políticas e gestão para esse nível de ensino nos sistemas públicos e privados, que se configuraram em efetivo processo de reforma desse nível de ensino, ainda que tenha prescindindo de participação efetiva dos diferentes segmentos da sociedade acadêmica, sob os auspícios da reforma do Estado e da centralidade conferida, nesse processo, ao setor privado. Aliado às análises efetivadas sobre o impacto da reorganização dos sistemas público e privado da educação superior, por meio de políticas de expansão, privatização e de alteração da identidade das IES, o presente artigo busca descortinar reflexões e indicar princípios basilares a serem efetivados em prol da construção de um processo de reestruturação da educação superior que tenha por norte o resgate da educação superior pública, democrática e de qualidade social entendida como um direito social inalienável.