Larry L. Leslie

Are high response rates essential to valid surveys

At present, the credibility of survey research findings is largely a function of response rate. Low return rates are presumed to suggest biases in data. This paper demonstrates that when surveys are made of homogeneous populations (persons having some strong group identity) concerning their attitudes, opinions, perspectives, etc., toward issues concerning the group, significant response-rate bias is probably unlikely. This is because on matters related to the group, persons having strong identification with the group tend to respond more as members of the group than as members of some social classification, such as the middle class, those over 50 years of age or members of the Democratic party. Although at first glance these survey conditions may seem rather unique, most surveys in the social sciences are probably precisely of this sort. Most are probably of homogeneous populations on matters obviously concerning them.

Expanding and Elaborating the Concept of Academic Capitalism

In our recent book, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial University (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997), we used the term ‘academic capitalism’ to define the way public research universities were responding to neoliberal tendencies to treat higher education policy as a subset of economic policy (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2000). In this policy environment faculty and professional staff increasingly must expend their human capital stocks in competitive environments. The implication is that some university employees are simultaneously employed by the public sector and are increasingly autonomous of it. They are academics who act as capitalists from within the public sector: they are state-subsidized entrepreneurs.1 Academic capitalism deals with market and market-like behaviors on the part of universities and faculty. Market-like behaviors refer to institutional and faculty competition for monies, whether these are from external grants and contracts, endowment funds, university–industry partnerships, institutional investment in professors’ spin-off companies, student tuition and fees, or some other revenue-generating activity. What makes these activities market-like is that they involve competition for funds from external resource providers. If institutions and faculty are not successful, there is no bureaucratic recourse; they do without. Market behaviors refer to for-profit activity on the part of institutions, activity such as patenting and subsequent royalty and licensing agreements, spin-off companies, arms-length corporations (corporations that are related to universities in terms of personnel and goals, but are chartered legally as separate entities), and university–industry partnerships when these have a profit component. Market activity also covers more mundane operations, such as the sale of products and services from educational endeavors, for example logos and sports paraphernalia, profit-sharing with food services and bookstores and the like. Volume 8(2): 154–161 Copyright

Donor Behavior and Voluntary Support for Higher Education Institutions.

Income from private giving has always been of great importance to American colleges and universities. Through the rest of this century, however, maintaining and expanding these resources will approach crucial significance. In short, voluntary support has both a timeless and a timeliness dimension. Unlike appropriations and allocations from government and income from many other sources, voluntary support for colleges and universities takes on relatively unrestricted spending forms. Whereas the spending of governmental monies and other resources generally are prescribed or at least closely regulated, much voluntary support may be expended almost without constraint. The result is that endowment and related funds often are the major sources of institutional discretionary funds by which innovations may be introduced, risks may be taken, and investments in the future may be made. Voluntary support frequently provides the margin of excellence, the element of vitality, that separates one institution from another and allows institutions to escape from the routinized sameness of fully regulated organizations. In addition to the timeless importance of voluntary support, there is also a timeliness dimension. The present pervasive decline in resources available to institutions of higher education, caused by the ubiquitous budget cuts on campus, has raised the importance of voluntary support to a critical level. Voluntary support is becoming the only source of real discretionary money and in many cases is assum-

Economies of Scale in Higher Education: Sixty Years of Research

Abstract: This study synthesizes empirical research on the effects of scale (enrollment size) on average cost per student in higher education using a meta-analytic approach. Results are reported separately for two-year colleges, four-year colleges, and universities, and for expenditures in several areas including instruction and administration. The institution is the primary unit of analysis. Scale effects are most noticeable at low enrollment levels and for administrative functions.

The Development and Current Status of Market Mechanisms in United States Postsecondary Education.

Market forces are powerful in U.S. postsecondary education. Such forces were employed when the first postsecondary institutions were established in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and many present day forms can be traced to these early beginnings. Over recent years public university revenue shares in block-grants from state governments have declined, thereby destabilizing the institutions. The universities have compensated by increasing shares from grant and contracting organizations and from students. The end result has been that expenditure shares for instruction have declined while shares for research and for administration have increased. Internally, these changes in “resource dependencies” have lead to the redistribution of internal university power, loss of “community”, and ever-higher charges to students.

State Appropriations and Enrollments: Does Enrollment Growth Still Pay?.

Most public institutions of higher education implicitly structure enrollment policy around the belief that higher enrollments mean greater state appropriations. Corollary beliefs are that if enrollments can be maintained, state appropriations will be maintained, and if enrollments decline, state appropriations will decline commensurately. These beliefs or assumptions by enrollment policy makers are based on direct observations over time, on numerous interactions with legislative committees, and on the common folklore surrounding the financing of American higher education. Here, we examine the larger question of whether such assumptions still undergird the state appropriations process, if indeed they ever did. Specifically, we pose the following questions: (1) What is the history of the fundingenrollment relationship and has it changed recently? (2) How have economic factors affected the relationship? (3) Can institutions gain large amounts of additional funding through rapid enrollment growth, particularly if a weaker funding-enrollment environment has developed? (4) Conversely, do slowly growing or declining institutions continue to face large funding cutbacks? A survey of state finance officers and pertinent national data files addressed these questions within an empirical model of the appropriations-enrollment relationship. Initially, a survey was taken of state finance officers or their surro-

Higher Education and Regional Development

At the outset it is necessary to clarify what is meant by economic development as it relates to higher education. Currently, when community leaders speak of economic development in relation to higher education, they seem to have a fairly limited, investment as opposed to consumption, benefit in mind.1Their attention appears drawn exclusively, or nearly so, to how higher education research can be translated into community jobs and related economic gains over the long term. There is an implied focus on indirect benefits — investment benefits — as opposed to direct benefits normally associated with consumption spending. Phrases such as “technology transfer” and “university — business partnerships” capture the essence of what seems intended or hoped for.

Rates of return as informer of public policy

Policy makers often employ rate of return (RoR) information in formulating public resource allocation decisions. A noteworthy present example is the World Bank, which uses RoR to advise Third World countries (TWCs) as they set student subsidy levels, tuition levels, and allocations by level of education (i.e., elementary, secondary, higher). This paper demonstrates that in the main RoR may be inappropriate policy devices for such aims because (1) major validity problems surround RoR formulations, (2) emphasis upon average RoR may misinform policy, and (3) RoR calculations are more sensitive to cost than benefits variations. It is concluded that true RoR to education are higher than conventionally estimated and in most cases support increased public resource allocations to various levels of education. Further, RoR evidence does not support reallocations from higher to lower educational levels, and World Bank advice to TWCs, most notably sub-Saharan Africa, may be in error.

Changing Patterns in Student Financing of Higher Education.

Student financing of higher education has undergone major change since prices began to rise rapidly and the Education Amendments were passed in the early 1970s. Presently, the major thrust is to lower the government role in student financing and to raise the student role. Debate has centered on whether parents are more or less able, and willing, to finance their offspring; whether, in fact, tuition prices have risen in constant dollars; whether (and which) students have been more or less able to finance themselves; whether (and for whom) debt reliance has increased; and finally what role student grants and scholarships have come to play in student financing, and which students have benefited most? This article addresses these and related questions through examining changes over time in the amounts financed by students enrolled in higher education and in the changing sources of student funds. The article shows how various student groups, for example, racial minorities, part-time attenders, low-income youth, males and females, differ from one another in these regards and how these patterns impact upon the various institutional categories. For example, how does student financing at public and private and two-year and four-year institutions compare? The major findings are as follows:

The College Student Grant Study: The Enrollment and Attendance Impacts of Student Grant and Scholarship Programs.

This paper considers the effects of the present redirection of public support of higher education from institutional to student support categories. Utilizing a conceptual framework taken from econo...