Research News

David Tanner and Karen Webber have been selected to receive an award through the President’s Interdisciplinary Seed Grant Program.

IHE alumna Lucia Brajkovic has received Honorable Mention in the 2017 Best Dissertation Award competition established by the Comparative and International Education Society’s Higher Education Special Interest Group.

She was presented with the award in March at the CIES HESIG business meeting in Atlanta. CIES is a scholarly association dedicated to increasing the understanding of educational issues, trends and policies through comparative, cross-cultural and international perspectives.  

A paper co-authored by IHE faculty members Karen Webber and Manuel González Canché has been selected by the board of the Southern Association for Institutional Research (SAIR) as the Best Paper winner for 2016.

The paper, entitled “Is There a Gendered Path to Tenure?: Examining the Academic Trajectories of US Doctoral Recipients,” is automatically accepted for presentation at the 2017 Association for Institutional Research Forum to be held May 30-June 2 in Washington, D.C.  The co-authors will receive travel grants to assist with costs of traveling to the forum.

Assistant Professor Manuel González Canché was named the recipient of the 2016 Promising Scholar/Early Career Award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education. He was honored at an awards luncheon on Nov. 11 during the 2016 national ASHE conference in Columbus, Ohio.

Manuel González Canché, an assistant professor in the University of Georgia’s Institute of Higher Education, has been named the recipient of the 2016 Promising Scholar/Early Career Award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education.

IHE doctoral student Emmanuel Little receives grant for Call Me MISTER program from the Betty and David Fitzgerald Foundation.

Emmanuel Little, director of Georgia College and State University’s Call Me MISTER program, was instrumental in the receipt of a $75,000 grant award from the Betty and David Fitzgerald Foundation for the program. Call Me MISTER (Mentors Instructing Students Toward Effective Role models), founded at Clemson University in 2000, strives to increase the pool of available teachers from diverse backgrounds, particularly for low-performing elementary schools.

Ashley Clayton joined the IHE in August after earning her Ph.D. in educational research and policy analysis at North Carolina State University, where she gained research and teaching experience, in addition to rigorous methodological training.

We are pleased to announce that the Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement’s issue 20(2), June 2016, has been published. This is the first issue in the journal's 20th anniversary year and can be viewed online.

Two students who recently earned degrees from the Ph.D. program in the Institute of Higher Education are moving on to faculty positions.

Denisa Gándara and Jarrett Warshaw, who participated in the Graduate Commencement ceremony held May 13 in Stegeman Coliseum, are now headed to Southern Methodist University and Florida Atlantic University, respectively.

IHE doctoral student Kelly Slaton was selected as a fellow for the 2016 NCES/NSF Summer Data Institute.

The institute, to be held June 20-22 in Washington, D.C., is an intensive short-term study with NCES datasets and research methodologies using large-scale national data sources. Competitive application to be selected is announced on the website of the American Institutes for Research each fall. Slaton is the most recent in a long line of IHE members who have attended the Data Institute.

Sheila Slaughter presenting "Private AAU University Networks as Enclaves for University-Industry Innovation and Co-evolution"

Monday, May 23 11:30-12:30 Institute of Higher Education  Meigs Hall, Room 101

The title of his presentation is "Degree Production and Cost Efficiency: An Application of Stochastic Frontier and Spatial Analysis."

Dr. Marvin Titus will present the first Education Policy Seminar for the 2015-16 academic year. He is associate professor of higher education at the University of Maryland. He earned his bachelor’s degree in economics and history from York College of the City University of New York, masters in economics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and doctorate in education policy, planning and administration from the University of Maryland.

Jennifer Rippner (Ph.D. 2013), who recently served as an IHE postdoctoral research and teaching associate, has a new book out based on her dissertation research.

Jason C. Lee, a graduate student and research assistant in the Institute of Higher Education, has been named the 2016 recipient of the Zell and Shirley Miller Fellowship, awarded annually to an IHE doctoral student of high promise.

Research by IHE professor Rob Toutkoushian and two IHE students on what is meant by the term “first-generation student” was reported in a recent Inside Higher Ed article, following a presentation on their findings at the 2015 ASHE conference.

Despite the widespread use of the term by educators and policy makers, “no one has defined what they mean by ‘first generation,’” says Toutkoushian, who used data from a nationally representative sample of students for his study, assisted by graduate students Rob Stollberg and Kelly Slaton.

Sixteen IHE students are participating in a total of 27 presentations, poster sessions and roundtables at the 2015 conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) in Denver this week.

Their topics – ranging from investigating student loan debt to outcomes-based funding policies – relate to the theme of the 40th annual conference: Inequality & Higher Education.

IHE professor and associate director James Hearn is among 13 higher education researchers and thought leaders nationally who have authored a series of papers to be released over the coming months by the Lumina Foundation.

IHE Fellow Lorilee R. Sandmann is a 2015 inductee for membership in the Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship (ACES).

She was one of nine inducted during a Sept. 30 ceremony at the Engagement Scholarship Consortium Conference held at Penn State University.  A professor emerita in the Department of Lifelong Education, Administration, and Policy at UGA, Sandmann serves as editor of the Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement.

Athens, GA – Denisa Gándara, a doctoral candidate in the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia, has recently received two prestigious honors. She is one of 33 students nationally awarded a 2015 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, and she is also one of nine students receiving support from a minority dissertation fellowship program of the American Educational Research Association.

The Institute of Higher Education invites applications for a post-doctoral research and teaching position. The position is designed to engage an emerging scholar in the Institute’s research and teaching mission. The candidate should have expertise aligning with the overall research interests of the faculty, while also bringing new areas of inquiry into the Institute’s research activities. The candidate should also have appropriate expertise to teach in the Institute’s graduate curriculum.

Denisa Gándara has been awarded a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. The dissertation fellowship provides one year of support to individuals working toward completing their dissertation. It is intended to support the final year of writing and defense of the dissertation.

An Institute of Higher Education graduate’s dissertation has been selected as the runner-up (semi-finalist) for the Politics of Education Association Outstanding Dissertation of the Year Award. Mary Milan Deupree’s (Ph.D. 2013) dissertation “’Policy Be Damned, Research Be Damned’: A Multiple Case Study of Research Use in Undocumented Student Policy Decisions,” will be recognized at the 2015 American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual meeting in Chicago in April.

Editors: Karen L. Webber, Associate Professor in the Institute of Higher Education, University of Georgia, USA; and Angel J. Calderon, Principal Advisor of Planning and Research, RMIT University, Australia.

Timothy Cain writes and teaches about the history of higher education, university faculty, campus speech, and learning outcomes assessment. He is currently writing a book on the history of faculty unionization from 1918-1980, arguing that unions were significant even before they could collectively bargain and that studying their contested rise reveals core tensions in American higher education.

Slaughter received the Howard R. Bowen Distinguished Career Award, which is the highest honor presented to an individual by ASHE. The award is presented to “an individual whose professional life has been devoted in substantial part to the study of higher education and whose career has significantly advanced the field through extraordinary scholarship, leadership and service,” according to the ASHE website.