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Academics and administrators frequently lament the bureaucracy in higher education, which diverts attention from teaching and research. Heightened monitoring of institutions as a result of dominant neoliberal ideologies shapes perceptions of accreditation as a bureaucratic burden rather than a value-added tool for continuous quality improvement. This paper aims to identify factors that positively and negatively impact a culture of quality in North American accredited postsecondary institutions to address issues of equity and inform policy changes that are relevant to community needs.

Academics’ and administrators’ perceptions of accreditation processes are explored through an interpretivist mixed-methods study that combined focus group and survey results from over 200 participants representative of four-year private and four- and two-year public institutions and tribal colleges in North America.

Findings suggest that a utilitarian and exclusionary mindset perpetuated by neoliberal logics restricts participatory decision-making processes in postsecondary institutions. Furthermore, the research identified a noticeable gap between those who are invited to participate in accreditation processes and those who contribute to decision-making. This lack of inclusive governance inhibits the ability of institutions to respond appropriately to the needs of its community.

The scope of the study and prioritization of qualitative data offers a comprehensive picture of academics’ and administrators’ perceptions and positions them as the experts in their own learning and development. Through participant narratives, strategies for increasing the value of quality assurance processes are illuminated. As a result, the study participants become the change agents who provide the solutions for ameliorating academics’ and administrators’ resistance to quality assurance.

My study examines the pay-for-performance relationship surrounding executive compensation in higher education. There has been much criticism of the rising levels of university presidential pay, particularly in the public sector, citing it is pay without performance. Public colleges and universities are funded by taxpayers; therefore, their expenditures are even more heavily scrutinized than private institutions. Many feel that university executives are overpaid and are not delivering a return in the form of enhanced institutional performance to their investors, the public. Growing student debt only adds intensity to the outcry against heightened compensation. Proponents of the increasing pay levels contend that the ever-changing role of the university president and competition in the marketplace for talent warrants such compensation. Using data obtained from The Chronicle of Higher Education and Integrated Postsecondary Education System websites, I find a highly significant and positive relationship between compensation for executives at four-year public institutions and both the levels of university endowment and enrollment. These results support the pay-for-performance debate. In contrast, results for other performance measures, scholarships and graduation rates, do not support the debate. My study contributes to the literature examining pay-for-performance in higher education with an empirical analysis examining the institutional determinants of executive compensation for public colleges and universities.

The environment surrounding U.S. higher education has changed substantially over the past 40 years. However, we have a limited understanding of what these changes mean for the higher education organizations (HEOs) that occupy this organizational field. In this paper, I use descriptive statistics and multilevel latent class analysis (MLCA) to analyze the financial behaviors of public four-year HEOs from 1986 to 2010 to evaluate how HEOs adapt financially to their changing environments. I advance the current conceptual and empirical understanding of public HEO behaviors by evaluating how public HEOs utilize combinations of revenue and spending streams to accomplish their mission and the extent to which the revenues and spending patterns of these institutions are related. Descriptive results confirm the shift away from state funding toward tuition revenues and the relative stability in spending patterns. MLCA results, which allow for the investigation of how combinations of revenue and spending streams work together, indicate that public HEOs are changing the combinations of revenues they rely on in different ways, revealing multiple specific pathways for how public HEOs adapt to their changing environments. The spending profiles, in contrast, remain stable with only a few HEOs changing their profile over time. I argue that the loose coupling between revenues and spending and discontinuity in their patterns of change over time suggests that public HEOs are able to establish a buffer between their environment and spending or activities that allows them to continue engaging in the same broad set of activities despite environmental changes.

This study examines the characteristics that affect college persistence from the first to second year among low-socioeconomic status (SES) high school graduates who enrolled in a two- or four-year college degree program, using the ELS:2002 database. Specifically, this study compares the influences of student entry characteristics, social and cultural capital, institutional characteristics, and college experiences across SES quartiles. While academic preparation and college support measures were predictors of persistence for all groups, predictors of persistence for low-SES students included measures of academic preparation and talking with faculty or advisors. Implications extend to institutional responses needed to support the success of low-SES students.

HBCUs are significant in their number and in the number of minority students they graduate annually. They are located across Alabama, Arkansas, California, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. They make up approximately 3% of the nation's institutions of postsecondary education. In 2001, they enrolled more than 14% of all Black students in higher education, and more than 30% of Blacks graduated with a baccalaureate degree, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (2004). There are 40 four-year public institutions, 49 four-year private institutions, 11 two-year public institutions, and 5 two-year private institutions. North Carolina has 11 HBCUs, more than any other state. Alabama has nine HBCUs, and Georgia and South Carolina have eight each. Both Mississippi and Texas have seven HBCUs. The first HBCU, Cheyney University, was founded in 1837. It was followed by two other historically Black institutions, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania (1854) and Wilberforce University in Ohio (1856).

This paper aims to investigate the relation between the creditworthiness of US institutions of higher education and their student selectivity (i.e. demand and quality).

The authors study whether the impact of student selectivity differs across public vs private universities; across the credit quality of the given public university’s state; and across the level of state appropriations for the given public university.

The authors find that student quality and demand measures are significantly associated with their corresponding institution’s creditworthiness, especially for private universities.

For public universities the association is weak and, contrary to the expectations, does not depend on the state credit quality or level of state funding. The findings are robust to the inclusion of control variables.

Postsecondary institutions use metrics such as student retention and college completion rates to measure student success. Multiple factors affect the success of first time in college (FTIC) and transfer students. Transfer student success rates are significantly low, with most transfer students nationwide failing to complete their degrees in four-year institutions. The purpose of this study is to better understand the degree progression patterns of both student types in two undergraduate science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) programs: computer science (CS) and information technology (IT). Recommendations concerning academic advising are discussed to improve transfer student success.

This study describes how transfer student success can be improved by thoroughly analyzing their degree progression patterns. This study uses institutional data from a public university in the United States. Specifically, this study utilizes the data of FTIC and transfer students enrolled in CS and IT programs at the targeted university to understand their degree progression patterns and analyzes the program curricula using network science curricular analytics method to determine what courses in the curriculum require more assistance to retain students.

The major findings of this study are: (1) students’ degree mobility patterns within an institution differ significantly between transfer and FTIC students; (2) some similarities exist between the CS and IT programs in terms of transfer students' degree mobility patterns; (3) transfer students' performance in basic and intermediate level core courses contribute to differences in transfer students' mobility patterns.

This study introduces the concept of “mobility patterns” and examines student degree mobility patterns of both FTIC and transfer students in a large public university to improve the advising process for transfer students regarding courses and identifying secondary majors.

The purpose of this chapter is to expand our understanding of the types of Black families that are using Parent PLUS, the types of institutions that rely on Parent PLUS the most, and the outcomes of students who use Parent PLUS to finance their first year of college.

I used descriptive analyses on several datasets collected by the U.S. Department of Education: IPEDS, BPS:04/09, and NPSAS.

The data revealed that (a) of Parent PLUS borrowers, greater shares of low-income Black families are borrowing than White families; (b) many institutions that serve Black students (including HBCUs) give out small amounts of institutional aid but also have much smaller endowments than non-Black-serving institutions; and (c) many families who borrow in their first year stop borrowing in their second year – and of those who stop borrowing, many transfer institutions.

Serving as a starting point in the conversation to Black families borrowing PLUS, this study is not causal and is limited by the unavailability of student-level data on PLUS borrowers. Estimating from nationally representative studies and examining Black-serving institutions is the next-best approximation.

The efforts to standardize financial aid award letters and provide better consumer information to parents must also include PLUS. Moreover, we need to find sustainable solutions for PLUS-reliant institutions to increase their capacity to provide institutional aid.

This chapter contributes to conversation around a controversial financial aid product that has been largely understudied, and in particular for Black families who borrow PLUS at the highest rates.

Globalization has impacted societies around the world in numerous and varied ways; the impact is economic, political, cultural, and educational. Globalization helped spur a major transformation of the U.S. economy beginning 1980s. The transformation of the U.S. economy began at a time when persons of color were continuing their fight to gain access to the nation's colleges and universities. The battle for access to postsecondary education involved legal battles for access to selective public institutions. The battle for access also coincided with a larger struggle among persons of color to overcome unequal primary and secondary education and gain access to colleges and universities of all types. In many ways the legacy of segregation continued to be an obstacle to persons of color.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how postsecondary mentoring programs address mentee dispositions prior to the mentee entering the reciprocal relationship, particularly which mentee dispositions are valued across mentoring program types, including peer, community-to-student, faculty-to-student and faculty-to-faculty programs.

This study employed quantitative content analysis to examine 280 institutional US postsecondary mentoring websites across four different institution types (public, four-year; private, four-year, non-profit; private, four-year, for-profit; public, two-year) and four different mentoring program types (peer or student-to-student, community-to-student, faculty-to-student and faculty-to-faculty programs). Grounded coding strategies were employed to generate these four mentoring program types, supported by extant research (Crisp et al., 2017).

Of 280 mentoring programs, 18.6 percent articulated mentee dispositions prior to entering the reciprocal relationship. When mentoring programs did address mentees, most programs articulated mentor duties aligned with mentee expectations (47.5 percent of programs) and program outcomes for mentees (65.7 percent of programs) rather than what the mentee can and should bring into a reciprocal relationship.

This study is delimited by its sample size and its focus on institutional website content. Future studies should explore how mentoring programs recruit and retain mentees, as well as how website communications address the predispositions and fit of mentees within different types of mentoring programs.

This study provided evidence that many postsecondary mentoring programs in the USA may not be articulating programmatic expectations of mentees prior to the mentoring relationship. By failing to address mentee predispositions, mentoring programs may not be accurately assessing their mentor’s compatibility with their mentees, potentially leading to unproductive mentoring relationships.

This study affirms extant research (Black and Taylor, 2017) while connecting mentor- and coaching-focused literature to the discussion of a mentee dispositions scale or measurement akin to Crisp’s (2009) College Student Mentoring Scale and Searby’s (2014) mentoring mindset framework. This study also forwards an exploratory model of mentoring program inputs and outputs, envisioning both mentor and mentee characteristics as fundamental inputs for a mentoring program rather than traditional models that view mentors as inputs and mentee achievements as outputs (Crisp, 2009; Searby, 2014).