Faculty Research Colloquium

Faculty around the Institute of Higher Education know that research is a verb. They seek to connect their investigations to policy initiatives and general improvements in decision making in higher education. Here, IHE professors share a sampling of current projects.

Erik Ness | How Can SHEEOs and Intermediary Organizations Work Together?

Recently, higher education scholars have highlighted the roles and influence of foundations, think tanks, and other advocacy organizations in education policy.

Researchers often refer to these organizations as intermediaries, or intermediary organizations, due to their boundary-spanning role in connecting governmental and private actors with higher education campus and system upper-level administrators.

Unfortunately, despite this rising visibility, little attention has been given to the actor most likely to engage with these organizations: the State Higher Education Executive Officer (SHEEO). As the leader of the state higher education agency or system, the officer has a dual responsibility both to govern or coordinate campuses and to build public support for the higher education sector. By better understanding the context, mission, and objectives of intermediary organizations, SHEEOs can better collaborate.

A recent study by Jim Hearn, Paul Rubin (PhD 2017), and me found that SHEEOs engage with intermediaries in three main ways. First, they may invite intermediary organizations to consult on policy and practice issues, collect data, or participate in presentations and deliberations of policy. Second, outside actors or internal state actors such as governors, foundations or legislators may influence SHEEOs directly to work with a specific intermediary organization focused on the state’s policies and practices. Finally, SHEEOs may learn indirectly of activity by intermediary organizations within the state and may find themselves debating with these organizations without prior coordination.

This study benefitted from a multiyear grant-funded project led by Jim Hearn and me, along with eight IHE doctoral students over several years into the role that intermediary organizations play in fostering research used in state-level college completion policy activities. In addition to observing key meetings and analyzing documents, our research team interviewed 99 policy actors—including elected officials and their aides, state higher education leaders, campus officials, and intermediary organization leaders. Ultimately, our study revealed dozens of intermediaries that state-level policy actors identified as playing significant roles in the final college completion policies adopted by the state.

One key over-arching finding from this project was that intermediary organizations can be positioned on a “two-communities” continuum between researchers and policymakers. Researcher communities tend to value systematic, rigorous analysis with an aim to inform decisions rather than promote specific policies. At the other end of the continuum, policymaker communities tend to value clear policy positions that are practical, timely, and cognizant of political realities.

An appreciation of an intermediary’s goals and conceptualization of its role in the process can assist SHEEOs and other higher education advocates to recognize which organizations will be most effective in different settings and for specific projects. Our study may also help intermediaries position themselves and advocate more effectively with SHEEOs and other key actors.

Professor Ness conducts research on higher education politics and policy. His research agenda primarily follows two paths: public policy effects, especially on students, institutions, and state systems; and the public policymaking process, specifically research utilization and the political dynamics associated with state-level higher education policy adoption.

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Karen Webber | How Do We Make Sense of the Numbers?

The era of big data in higher education has arrived. Strategies for the collection of data and advanced analytics related to students and to institutional performance have evolved quite rapidly, and they continue to advance as the field of data science captures more attention across the higher education sector.

Pausing to consider the implications of how data is stored and used at the federal government level through the individual institutional programs, I structured my research into a critical assessment of the education community’s approach to analytics. The resulting multiyear investigations and discussions with other colleagues led to a new book and the development of a new graduate-level course at IHE.

In the handling of data, higher education leaders must be mindful of ethics, privacy, and the general responsible use of data. Senior administrators, and especially officials in institutional data governance programs, should plan strategies for proper treatment before its collection. Student and staff privacy, as well as adherence to data collection and sharing policies (e.g., GDPR, FERPA, HIPPA), must be ensured.

Beyond collection and storage, the way analysts represent data and construct explanatory statements, tables, and images often runs counter to established standards of good design. Infographics, while intuitively appealing, may offer challenges to read and understand them fully. My research continues to draw on studies by cognitive psychologists such as Barbara Tversky and the writings of Alberto Cairo and Edmund Tufte to promote best practices in data presentation.

We also make the case for the importance of Data-Informed Decision Making (DIDM) rather than Data-Driven Decision Making (DDDM). Where DDDM lets the data “drive” the decision making, removing human consid- eration of the context, DIDM recognizes that human judgement is a key element in complex, dynamic, and strategic decision making.

The more intense use of data analytics offers many positive and exciting advantages; however, potentials for misuse, misinterpretation, and/or unintended consequences cannot be ignored. Even when equipped with sufficient data and excellent analysis, higher education leaders should draw also on their professional experience, political acumen, ethical practice, and strategic considerations in making decisions.

Continued advocacy for and education of responsible data handling and representation is necessary to protect students and allow the data to tell its many stories accurately.

Professor Webber publishes research on a number of issues related to institutional effectiveness in higher education. Her primary research interests remain centered on the assessment of academic, cognitive, and psychosocial growth of college students, with additional interests in gender studies, and higher education data management.

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Jim Hearn | Does Turning to Non-tenure-line Faculty “Pay off” for Struggling Institutions?

Increasingly, universities are relying on non-tenure-line faculty for delivering their courses and advising their students. Currently, only about a third of the faculty in public universities are tenured or on tenure lines, a drop from well over half only 30 years ago. In the corporate world, moving away from a stable long-term labor force with employer-provided health and retirement benefits is often portrayed as a way to reduce costs, increase strategic flexibility, and improve overall financial health. In higher education, Clayton Christensen and other “disruption” advocates have made the same argument: college and university finances will improve if institutions step away from their longstanding commitments to faculty tenure.

Strikingly, empirical evidence supporting this claim to fiscal benefit for postsecondary institutions is lacking. In response, IHE alumna Rachel Burns (PhD 2018) and I are working quantitatively to test proponents’ claims that moving to a more “contingent” (i.e., contractual, non-tenure-line) faculty work force provides meaningful financial benefits. We are building on my work with earlier IHE doctoral students, including Mary Milan Deupree (PhD 2013), Austin Lacy (PhD 2011), and Karley Riffe (PhD 2018). We are benefiting conceptually and empirically from recent work by IHE professor Sheila Slaughter, IHE alums Barrett Taylor (PhD 2012) and Kelly Rosinger (PhD 2015), and former IHE postdoctoral fellows Brendan Cantwell and Sondra Barringer.

Our project focuses on financially stressed public universities, where funding cuts have driven leaders to adopt new internal approaches while seeking new revenue channels. Across these struggling institutions, substantial variation exists in how aggressively schools have disrupted their faculty employment arrangements. Using the federal IPEDS data, we are exploiting that variation to discern whether moving away from tenure-centered employment contributes over time to improved financial health.

Our early results do not support the disruption hypothesis. Controlling for a variety of related organizational and financial characteristics, we have thus far been unable to discern any significant improvement in public universities’ finances from retreating from tenure-line appointments. Of course, even if our initial findings hold up, they do not necessarily imply that there are no benefits to institutions that move to contingent faculty hiring. It may be that, over time, advantages may emerge that are not apparent from our current data. It is clear that the costs potentially associated with contingency (to student success, faculty engagement, and employee turnover) are substantial and may offset whatever gains the lower payouts for faculty salaries achieve.

Professor Hearn focuses his research on organization, policy, and finance in postsecondary education. His research has appeared in education, sociology, and economics journals, as well as in several edited books.

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Rob Toutkoushian | What Are the Supply and Demand Determinants of Distance from Home to College?

Researchers have long been interested in studying how students choose whether and where to go to college. An understudied issue, however, is why some students stay close to home for college while others do not. The distance that a student travels from home to college is important because the cost of going to college may become prohibitive with distance. Students with fewer proximate postsecondary options may be less inclined to pursue a degree.

In this study, we will use data from the Educational Longitudinal Survey of 2002 (ELS:02) to examine the distances between a student’s home and the colleges to which they apply, and the factors that are associated with student application behavior. We also will use data from Nicholas Hillman’s (2016) study on commuting zones to test the notion that the availability of college options within commuting distance from students’ homes affects the geographic size of postsecondary markets they consider at the application stage. The study relies on quantitative research methods, primarily multiple regression analysis, to isolate how personal, family, and geographic factors are associated with the distance between a student’s home and the colleges and universities that he or she considers.

In some of our preliminary results, we have found that students with higher academic ability tend to apply to colleges farther from home, as do students coming from higher-income families. Likewise, the distance from home to college tends to increase along with parental education levels. Our findings also suggest that students who live in areas with fewer postsecondary options develop larger geographic spans of markets. Accordingly, this implies that students in “higher education deserts” partially offset the geographic disadvantage by expanding the distance that they travel from home to college.

The study is funded in part by the Spencer Foundation and is a collaborative project involving IHE doctoral student Stephen Mayfield and alumna Samantha Rogers (PhD 2018). Our hope is our work will help education policymakers gain a better understanding of how students form the geographic span of higher education markets that they consider and will identify possible barriers that students face in going to college.

Professor Toutkoushian is currently involved in an analysis of educator pension plans, a study of the success of first-generation college students, a study of the determinants of excess revenues for colleges, and a study of how students define the markets that they consider for going to college.

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Greg Wolniak | How Does One Know the True Cost of College?

About four years ago, colleagues and I noticed that public colleges and universities were cultivating new revenue streams to cope with declining state appropriations and rising instructional costs. One emergent coping strategy is to charge differential tuition (DT) amounts based on a student’s major or year of enrollment. While the practice may raise revenue for the institution, we noted that it adds complexity and potential for misinterpretation among prospective students who are attempting to estimate the true costs of attendance.

In 2016, in collaboration with Casey George (University of Louisville) and Glen Nelson (Idaho State University), I received a one-year grant from the Spencer Foundation to study the prevalence of DT practices in the United States.

Our team documented the history of, and substantial rise in, DT practices at public four-year, research-intensive universities over the past 25 years. Based on our calculations, more than half of the nation’s public research institutions engage in DT. In addition to the near ten- fold rise in DT practices, we found that an  institution’s historical group membership (such as land-grant status) significantly affect its   adoption of DT policies. (“The Emerging Differential Tuition Era among U.S. Public   Universities” https://doi. org/10.1163/9789004398481_012 in Under Pressure (Brill, 2019).

 That work has expanded into a robust line of inquiry that I refer to as the "Affordability and   Transparency Initiative." While tracking DT practices, our data collection was hindered by   difficulty in locating accurate tuition and cost information on college websites. I enlisted   qualitative researcher Laura Davis (University of Chicago Consortium on School Research) on a new project to uncover how information representation might affect students’ decision making. Among the study’s main findings was a wide variation of informational quality based on clarity of language, consistency and coherence of visual displays, and the navigational challenges stemming from information fragmentation and discontinuity. One notable and policy-relevant finding was that many net price calculators that universities are mandated to include on their websites show outdated or inaccurate information.

In our paper “Demystifying Tuition? A Content Analysis of the Information Quality of Public College and University Websites” (http://doi.org/10.1177/2332858419867650), we offer several recommendations for institutional practice. Efforts to redesign institutional websites should enlist support and guidance from campus officers, program leaders, and support providers who assist under- represented groups. Higher education remains our society’s primary mechanism for social mobility, and as cost of attendance continues to rise, colleges and universities should work to clarify and simplify their bottom-line tuition rates for prospective students from across diverse backgrounds.

Professor Wolniak conducts research on the socioeconomic effects of college. He is particularly interested in understanding how college students’ socioeconomic trajectories are affected by their educational choices, their institutional environments, and the degree to which their college experiences translate to post-college outcomes.

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Tim Cain | What If Agricultural Education Was Designed to Produce Revenue, Not Crops?

At midnight on Sunday, November 20, 1904, a delegation of 42 people boarded the “University of Georgia Special” and set out for a two-day train ride to Madison, Wisconsin. The party—composed of University of Georgia (UGA) leaders, state governmental officials, many of their wives, and journalists tasked with capturing the experience—was embarking on a site visit to examine the University of Wisconsin’s agricultural, extension, and other efforts. Their intent was to consider whether these initiatives might be implemented in the state of Georgia and to generate publicity that might drive state appropriations for university enhancement.

The delegation’s experiences in Madison, and the ideas that both fostered the trip and emanated from it, fundamentally altered the relationship of UGA to its state and the funding streams available to the institution. UGA launched university extension as a formal pro- gram and changed the character and scope of agricultural education in the rural state.

Pivoting around the week-long trip to Madison, this project, which I am undertaking with IHE doctoral students Erin Leach and Phil Adams, examines the rise of agricultural education and cooperative extension at UGA. It demonstrates the financial motives and political machinations that led the institution to adopt on- and extra-campus programs aimed at shoring up institutional finances as much or more than serving the needs of the state.

This project contributes to ongoing historiographical reconsiderations of land-grant colleges’ enactment of their democratic and service missions, as well to broader understandings of both institutional-state relations and what historian of higher education and long-time IHE friend John Thelin has termed the “horizontal” history of higher education.

We rely heavily on archival and other primary source materials that help us understand the context of educational funding, the efforts to improve the institution’s financial standing, and the reaction to both the Wisconsin trip and its aftermath. Phil Adams’s use of state legislative and related records to reconstruct state K-12 and higher education funding from the founding of UGA into the 20th century demonstrates the woeful state of institutional finances.

Erin Leach’s extensive examination of documents related to the planning for and experience of the trip to Madison reveal the political, publicity, and financial motivations behind the visit, as well as the influence of George Foster Peabody.

Together with additional archival work at UGA and beyond, as well as consideration of contemporaneous newspapers and related published sources, these pieces are helping us re-think the modernization of UGA and its implications for understanding land-grant colleges at the turn of the 20th century. 

Professor Cain’s research includes examinations of both modern and historic issues involving college students, faculty, and academic administrators. Current projects include considerations of college student protests in the long 1960s, the history of faculty unionization, and academic freedom at the turn of the 21st century.