Scott L. Thomas

A Typology of Federal and State Programs Designed to Promote College Enrollment

This study develops a typology to organize college-enrollment programs. The typology illustrates the emphasis on programs that are implemented directly from the government to the student and that provide financial resources to college students and variations in the pattern of programs across five states and the federal government.

Models of institutional resource allocation: Mission, market, and gender

In an era when expansion is no longer the obvious solution for dealing with curricular change in research universities, the question of how and why institutions allocate resources among departments, the organizational units that deliver curricula, should become increasingly important. Resource constraint has caused widespread restructuring in public research universities, but few studies examine its effects on departments, although the broad goals of restructuring are to redesign institutions to lower costs, achieve greater student learning, give more attention to teaching, and contribute to regional economic development (Guskin, 1994; Gumport & Pusser, 1996; Massey & Zemsky, 1994), all efforts that depend on departmental cooperation. Institutional resource allocation affects departments in a number of ways. The resources available to departments shape who is hired, how much and whom they teach. Quality of faculty and work load, in turn, influence research norms and productivity. Changes in patterns of resour ce allocation among departments are critical to understanding the shape of knowledge in the twenty-first century. In the 1980s, prompted by periodic state and institutional budget crises, researchers began to study internal resource allocation among departments within colleges and universities (Ashar, 1987; Ashar & Shapiro, 1990; Hackman, 1985; Melchiori, 1982; Morgan, 1983). But in the 1990s, questions about internal resource allocation among departments generally were put in the broader context of restructuring. This shift meant that attention turned away from departments as units that created and delivered particular kinds of knowledge and curricula efficiently and effectively and toward individual faculty performance on productivity measures as well as individual faculty response to institutional incentives (Layzell, 1996; Levin, 1991). If departments were considered at all, they were treated as generic departments that reacted to institutional and professional incentives rather than as departments organized around concrete kinds of knowledge, peopled by faculty with similar characteristics who trained students for specific careers (Fairweather, 1996; Massy & Wilger, 1992; Massy & Zemsky, 1994). Costing studies were the exceptions, but these used econometric models to identify abstract cost structures among departments aggregated in broad fields of study, a process that reified rather than explained patterns of difference in institutional investment (Brinkman, 1990; Dundar & Lewis, 1994). Along with a relatively small number of researchers using critical theory and feminist perspectives, we see this shift from department to individual, or, conversely, broad field of study (science and engineering, humanities, social sciences) as the unit of analysis, as masking increasing stratification between departments and within universities (Bellas, 1994, 1997; Gumport, 1993; Kerlin & Dunlap, 1993; McElrath, 1992; Slaughter, 1993; Volk, 1995). Critical researchers view faculty and the curricula they deliver as organized in departments that powerfully mediate individual faculty performance. Faculty delivering some curricula may not receive the same resources as faculty associated with other curricula, just as faculty in departments preparing students for certain careers may not be given the same support as faculty in other, more favored departments. Department, rather than individual faculty performance, may be a powerful explanatory variable. Faculty located in underresourced, overextended departments m ay not be able to respond fully to the complex array of institutional incentives and disincentives that characterize multimission public research universities. We think that understanding which departments receive resources and why is critical to understanding the far-reaching reorganization and revaluing of knowledge that is presently occurring. To explore our questions about resource allocation among departments, we reviewed the several theories that purport to explain variance in allocation. …

Institutional Conflict of Interest: The Role of Interlocking Directorates in the Scientific Relationships Between Universities and the Corporate Sector

We examined the potential for institutional conflict of interest between the 26 private universities belonging to the Association of American Universities and the corporations to which they are tied through their boards of trustees. We were interested in the degree to which interlocks may have tightened over three points across an 11-year period (1994–2005). Our examination relies on a set of patenting profiles estimated from the universities and corporations in our sample. These were derived through a set of organization-event networks that were compared in terms of their structural similarity. We generated these profiles at each of the three time periods. We then measured the degree to which interlocks existed within and between the profiles with the hypothesis that systematically tighter interlocks within profiles may suggest the greater potential for institutional conflict of interest.

U.S. Research Universities' Institutional Conflict of Interest Policies:

Research universities receive increasing amounts of income from intellectual property, which makes institutional conflict of interest (ICOI) policies increasingly important. We analyzed the content and scope of ICOI policies at 60 research universities in the U.S. Association of American Universities. In particular, we focused on the following categories: Disclosure, review, management, and prohibited or constrained activities. Most of the plans were relatively unelaborated, but 8 were elaborated “university as firm” policies that addressed the way officers and managers acting as agents for the university handled commercial activity through an array of management tools. However, even elaborated current ICOI policies may not be sufficient to manage ICOI because this type of commercial activity is not routine for universities in that faculty discovery or creation of intellectual property is not predictable. Thus, nearly all ICOI is managed on a case-by-case basis by various committees or senior institutional officials. As a result, institutional policy is only as strong as these committees and officers and the management plans they develop and monitor to handle conflicts.

An Introduction to Multilevel Modeling Techniques : MLM and SEM Approaches Using Mplus, Third Edition

1. Introduction 2. Getting Started with Multilevel Analysis 3. Multilevel Regression Models 4. Extending the Two-Level Regression Model 5. Defining Multilevel Latent Variables 6. Multilevel Structural Equation Models 7. Methods for Examining Individual and Organizational Change 8. Multilevel Models with Categorical Variables 9. Multilevel Mixture Models 10. Data Consideration in Examining Multilevel Models

State Political Culture, Higher Education Spending Indicators and Undergraduate Graduation Outcomes

Issues concerning higher education today (e.g., rising costs, declining public trust, changing state economics) have created new demands for postsecondary institutions to demonstrate their productivity. We examine whether differences in states’ political cultures (i.e., underlying traditions, values, and public policy choices) are reflected in variability between state finance policy indicators and institutional variables that explain undergraduate graduation rates. To test our proposed model, we use longitudinal data on state indicators and institutional variables that explain differences in graduation rates compiled over an 11-year period. Our findings suggest that differences in political culture represent mediating factors between states’ economic contexts and higher education appropriations, which help explain variation in their graduation rates over time.

Access and Success for Students from Indigenous Populations

In this chapter, we explore the history and cultural context of an important but little studied population in higher education, Native Hawaiians. On an applied level, the study of Native Hawaiian access and success in higher education may help to better document their condition and suggest useful ways for closing the durable gaps in attainment. On a theoretical level, the study of Native Hawaiians in education allows us to check assumptions about the generalizability of our existing models of access and success. This study also provides an opportunity to explore the utility of existing areas of critical theory built around Asian and Native American populations, in particular. We call attention to the need for systematic efforts to develop meaningful data and research on Native Hawaiian experiences in postsecondary education.