Daniel W. Lang

Incentives and Services for College Achievement: Evidence from a Randomized Trial

Many North American college students have trouble satisfying degree requirements in a timely manner. This paper reports on a randomized field experiment involving two strategies designed to improve academic performance among entering full-time undergraduates at a large Canadian university. One treatment group (“services”) was offered peer advising and organized study groups. Another (“incentives”) was offered substantial merit-scholarships for solid, but not necessarily top, first year grades. A third treatment group combined both interventions. Service take-up rates were much higher for women than for men and for students offered both services and incentives than for those offered services alone. No program had an effect on men’s grades or other measures of academic performance. However, the Fall and first-year grades of women in the combined group were significantly higher than those of women in the control group, and women in this group earned more course credits and were less likely than controls to be on academic probation. These differentials persisted through the end of the second year, in spite of the fact that incentives were given in the first year only. The results suggest that the study skills acquired in response to a combination of services and incentives can have a lasting effect, and that the combination of services and incentives is more promising than either alone.

A lexicon of inter-institutional cooperation

Recent studies have indicatedthat, while there is a great deal of interestamong both governments and institutions ininter-institutional cooperation, theterminology of cooperation is confused andimprecise. Mergers are sometimes characterizedas being an extension of inter-institutionalcooperation, sometimes they are regarded asseparate, unique, and situated on a plane orcontinuum different from that of suchstructures as federations and consortia. Yet,in generic terms, mergers share a number ofcharacteristics with other forms ofcooperation, and are often pursued for the samereasons. This study investigates the originsand motivations of inter-institutionalcooperation in order to show that the variousforms of cooperation, including merger, arepart of a single evolutionary continuum. Next,it develops a lexicon or taxonomy ofinter-institutional cooperation. Finally, itdiscusses the directions thatinter-institutional cooperation might take inthe future along that continuum.

The Role of Statements of Institutional Purpose.

This paper assesses the utility and role of institutional purpose statements. If they are as effective as one is led to believe, what intrinsic facts or elements make them so? Is there value in having a purpose statement, or is the value attributed to the exercise of creating and discussing it? If there is such a value, what forms and circumstances create the value? What forms do mission statements usually take? Do different forms have different attributes? In addressing these questions, two methods are employed. One is conventional in that literature documenting the theory and research of others has been carefully reviewed, but from the particular perspectives of form and effectiveness. The other is to examine a series of actual statements of institutional purpose, with particular regard to form, content, and context of planning. To elucidate the context of planning, a series of master plans and mission statements for systems of higher education are also examined. In total, 32 institutional statements and 12 system plans or statements are examined. (The plans that are examined are listed in Appendixes A and B.) The paper observes that mission statements are effective in some situations, but not in all. In some situations they may be disadvantageous. Although planning theorists suggest that mission statements follow an approximately common form, the study of actual statements indicates several different types.

Autonomy and Control: A University Funding Formula as an Instrument of Public Policy.

Formulas are used in many jurisdictions to allocate public funds among universities which may then have considerable autonomy in the internal allocation of those funds. This paper provides first an overview of formula funding as it affects university education. This is followed by an exposition on the balance between autonomy and accountability in the Province of Ontario. Formula funding in Ontario is used as a case study to evaluate how effective formula-funding has been in encouraging autonomous universities to work towards the attainment of public policy objectives. The analysis shows that four mechanisms have in fact been used - namely formula funding, designated extraformula grants, incentive funding, and controls - and that some objectives are better supported by different mechanisms. The paper concludes with a discussion of the evolution and an evaluation of formula funding in Ontario against the objectives given for its introduction.

Formulaic Approaches to the Funding of Colleges and Universities

Formulas have been in use in many jurisdictions since the early 1950s to allocate public funds among universities and colleges, and the basic concept of formula funding can be traced to as early as 1912 (Gross, 1979). At least thirty American states and seven Canadian provinces use funding formulas of one kind or another. In many of these same jurisdictions the universities and colleges that are funded by formula have considerable autonomy, including the autonomy to allocate internally the funds that are determined by formula. The discussion that follows will do two things. First it will provide an overview of formula funding, how it works, what it can do and what it cannot do. This will be followed by a consideration of the effects of funding formulas on institutional performance and particularly on the balance between accountability and diversity which can be struck depending on the particular forms that funding takes

Self-Regulation with Rules: Lessons Learned from a New Quality Assurance Process for Ontario.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss how the province over time has addressed problems that are generic to many jurisdictions in assuring quality: level of aggregation, pooling, definition of new and continuing programs, scope of jurisdiction, role of governors, performance indicators, relationship to accreditation, programs versus credentials, benchmarking and isomorphism. The paper will pay particular attention to the balance between institutional autonomy in promoting quality and innovation in contrast to system-wide standards for assuring quality. The Province of Ontario has had some form of quality assurance since 1969. For most of the period since then, there were separate forms for undergraduate and graduate programs. Eligibility for public funding is based on the assurance of quality by a buffer body. In 2010, after two years of work, a province-wide task force devised a new framework. Design/methodology/approach – The structure of the paper is a series of “problem/solution” discussio...

Approaches to the Funding of Schools and Their Effects on Capacity

Most debates about funding for education focus on the adequacy of the global amounts of money made available to schools, often without equally serious regard for how those amounts are distributed. That the balance of debate should fall on the side of adequacy is not surprising when one considers the fundamental reasons for making public investments in education in the first place. Even the phrase “making public investments” is significant. Making public investments in education is not in principle the same as making investments in public education. The form of investment can make a difference

Amos Brown and the educational meaning of the American Agricultural College Act

Introduction The passage of the Agricultural College Act in 1862 is widely regarded as the watershed from which the modern American public university emerged. The direct, albeit not immediate, eŒect of the Agricultural College Act was the creation of American `land grant’ colleges. The land grant colleges were a practical means of broadening access to higher education, in terms of both geography and participation. In the years that followed the passage of the Agricultural College Act, from the late 1860s to the beginning of the twentieth century, new universities were founded, existing colleges were revamped and reorganized, and the liberal arts or `classical’ college transformed. All these changes relied to a signi®cant degree on the model of the land grant college. In the half-century prior to the outbreak of the American Civil War, various attempts had been made to reform the American college, which itself was for the most part an adaptation of the English model of Renaissance collegiate education. Although there were many reformers, successful reforms were few in number and modest in terms of practical eŒect. Some of the most signi®cant reforms led in the direction of the German university, which was of considerable interest to the founders of Johns Hopkins University and the University of Michigan, both of which predated the Agricultural Act but in the end did not de®ne it. Had the spirit and substance of reform been incremental, progressive and in a consistent direction, the land grant college might then and now have been regarded conventionally as an evolutionary idea whose time had come. In fact, many historians of American higher education take the Whiggish view that the emergence of the modern American university was essentially a matter of progressive evolution. The history of the land grant university, however, is neither linear nor predetermined. A number of recent studies demonstrate that the movement towards the land grant university proceeded in ®ts and starts, none of which was entirely successful, some of which were failures, and all of which were problematic in one way or another. Thus when the Agricultural College Act was introduced, ®rst in 1857 and later in 1862, there was no broad consensus about the direction in which American higher education should move. In fact, the Agricultural College Act said more about how such a

Diversity and peer selection: Where do they intersect?

A common criticism of accountability schemes that are based on comparisons is that they fail to address legitimate and practical questions about how differentiation among institutions can be measured and promoted, and about how distinctive institutional mandates and roles — some of them determined by government mandate — can be recognised and appropriately funded within single systems of higher education. Responding to these queries and suggestions requires some yardstick by which to express and measure similarities and dis-similarities among institutions. At the same time individual institutions, for a variety of reasons ranging from accountability to the allocation of scarce resources, attempt to compare or ‘benchmark’ themselves against other institutions. Both activities involve measurement, classification, and the selection of peers. Although customarily addressed apart from one another, diversity and peer selection can be conceptually closely linked within single scales of similarity and dis-similarity. Existing paradigms that explain diversity might be too simple for reliable peer selection and comparison, and might fail to account for all expressions of diversity.