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The purpose of this paper is to suggest public service corporations as a new means of helping to finance comprehensive public colleges and universities based on a well‐documented assumption that the current shared responsibility for financing public colleges is broken.

The paper focuses on financing comprehensive public colleges and universities, and explicitly does not focus on research, community, or proprietary institutions. The paper draws heavily from national data and literature on college finance and productivity, and uses New Jersey's state colleges and universities as primary examples.

The paper asserts that a new funding rationale for public colleges is imperative or these institutions will fail the principal mission of broad access for middle‐income students. Citing examples from New Jersey and other states, and drawing on work of other policy analysts, the paper proposes creation of new public service corporations not only as a means of generating new revenue to replace diminished state investment, but also as a means of enhancing transparency, accountability and public trust. The paper discusses explicit purposes and measurable benefits of the public service corporation.

The paper is written by two higher education policy practitioners with a combined 40 years executive experience in higher education law and policy at the state and national levels. They have been a leading voice for policy innovation in New Jersey. The paper has significant value for college presidents, trustees, governors, legislators, and policy analysts.

Media characterizations of the state of higher education in America often seem bipolar. They emphasize either the accomplishments of the most successful elite schools or the failures of colleges that are beset by problems and falling behind the performance of schools in other developed societies. A more complete understanding of higher education is obtained by embracing an organization field perspective, which recognizes the multiplicity of schools that exist – their varying origins, missions, structures, and performance metrics. This diversity is concretized by focusing on the evolving characteristics of colleges in one metropolitan region: the San Francisco Bay Area. The field perspective also calls attention to the support and governance systems that surround colleges and account for much of the stability of the field.

Organization fields are shaped by both isomorphic and competitive processes. Isomorphic processes have been dominant for many years, but now competitive processes are in ascendance. All fields are embedded in wider societal structures, and the field of higher education is richly connected in modern societies with the economic, stratification, and political spheres. Some of these interdependences reinforce within-field processes, some recast them, and still others disrupt them. The appearance of new technologies, new types of students, and changing work requirements have begun to unsettle traditional field structures and processes and encourage the development of new modes of organizing. Over time, the dominant professional mode of organizing higher education is being undercut and, in many types of colleges, supplanted by one based on market forces and managerial logics.

This research paper aims to better understand the network structure of higher education in North America. It draws on a relationally networked dataset of 1,292 degree-granting colleges and universities in North America to develop a modularity class approach to categorizing colleges and universities based on their own self-defined peer networks and assesses the utility of the modularity class approach as well as several measures of network centrality for predicting offerings of new curricular fields. Results show that not all measures of network centrality equally predict organizational change outcomes, with hub/authority position being most important. Additionally, results show that an empirically derived modularity class approach to categorizing organizations has important strengths in relation to more typical approaches based on prestige or perceived organizational characteristics. The approaches detailed in this paper will be useful for future analysts seeking to explain the spread of innovations and behavior across the higher education institutional field, as well as those seeking to understand clustering and organizational divergence.

Strengthening the nation’s technological workforce, competing and expanding its relevance in the global economy, and maintaining personal as well as homeland security will be highly dependent on the quantity, quality, and diversity of the next generations of scientists, engineers, technologists, and mathematicians. Production of a diverse generation of human resources with relevant, competitive skills is critical. However, so too is the need to raise an enlightened citizenry with cross-cultural experience and cultural awareness competency, with a broad worldview and global perspectives. These requirements are critical to understanding the challenges and opportunities of scholarly activity in a pluralistic global environment and positioning ourselves to capitalize upon them. Scholars with cross-cultural experience and competency are empowered to adapt and work collaboratively, nationally and globally, with scholars of different races, geopolitical, socioeconomic, and cultural backgrounds. Development of effective strategies to transform science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) departments for inclusion and to broaden the participation in STEM across cultures, socioeconomic standing, race, and gender in higher education has been a dominant topic of pedagogical interest of national priority in the last several decades. However, success in these endeavors is achievable only through systemic change and a cultural shift to address the underlying root causes of socioeconomic disparity, gender, and racial disparities and a paucity of cultural awareness among all educational stakeholders. STEM departments can only be truly transformed for inclusion through the development of sensitive, creative, and student-engaging curricula and targeted recruitment and retention of underrepresented minorities in STEM. Formation of well-coordinated alliances spanning educational sectors, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and community engagement and outreach are also critical to promoting inclusive and broad participation in STEM education.

The first section of the chapter gives an introduction to various challenges, obstacles, and hindrances that prevent a successful transformation of K–12 science education as well as STEM departments in higher education for inclusion. The second section discusses historical perspectives of the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith (UAFS) – the institutional profile, missions, and visions of UAFS as a regional university. Policies and strategies for addressing the socioeconomic disparity, faculty gender, and racial disparities and cultural competency awareness at UAFS are also highlighted in this section. Other approaches including targeted efforts to recruit and retain underrepresented minority students, provision of financial assistance for students from low-income families, and a creative “Math-up” curriculum innovation to promote inclusive and broad participation in STEM at UAFS are highlighted in the latter section of the chapter. Formation of alliances between UAFS, local K–12 school districts, and governmental and non-governmental agencies to promote broad participation in STEM at UAFS are discussed. The last section of the chapter provides recommendations for adaptation and sustainability of strategies and efforts aimed at transforming national STEM departments for inclusion.

President Obama’s policies, while broad in scope, offer some specific attention to college and career readiness (CCR) and are necessary for urban youth to realize their career potentials. However, by primarily defining CCR in terms of academic achievement, many of the previously mentioned policies ignore the varied college access skills needed to ensure successful preparation for, enrollment in, and graduation from postsecondary institutions.

This chapter explores the current definition of CCR represented in the Obama administration’s policies, while also expanding the definition to include missing policy pieces related to college access.

The underutilization of school counselors and classroom teachers as college access facilitators who can expand CCR for urban schools is addressed. The paper discusses recent Obama administration initiatives and recommendations for urban schools and higher education institutions.

The administration initiatives and recommendations recently put in place by the Obama administration for urban schools and higher education institutions, if integrated within urban schools, may facilitate the realization of one of President Obama’s educational reform goals of ensuring that every student graduates from high school well prepared for college and a career.

Our analyses and conclusions are based on both research literature on college access for African American males and the survey responses of 214,951 full-time, first-time African American male freshmen between 1971 and 2004. First, we reviewed literature on the experiences of African American male high-school students and the common barriers facing their matriculation to college. We organized findings from the research into broad themes emerging from the literature, guided by Swail, Cabrera, Lee, and Williams's Integrated Model for Student Success (2005). Based on this framework, college access and academic achievement are not based on a single factor or one dimension; rather, they are constructed through a complex interaction of multiple dimensions. Swail and colleagues delineate these factors into three categories: cognitive, social, and institutional/systemic. Cognitive factors take place largely inside the student and relate to the skills, abilities, and knowledge students have which prepare them for higher education, including academic preparation, post-secondary planning, and college knowledge (Swail, Redd, & Perna, 2003; Swail et al., 2005). Social factors exist largely outside the student, and capture the ways in which those who have relationships with students can influence their access to post-secondary education. The social dimension includes a student's cultural history, family influence, financial issues and socioeconomic status, and ability to interact with peers (Swail, 2003; Swail et al., 2005). Finally the institutional/systemic dimension captures the ability of institutions to influence and shape student efforts to reach their college goals. High-school resources and support, outreach programs, and opportunities for financial aid could all be considered within this dimension of the framework (Swail, 2003; Swail et al., 2005).

This paper examines the growth of private corporate influence in American higher education. A key question is corporate philanthropy and privatization at what cost? The terms often used in these discussions are commodification of the academy, privatization of a public good, or the increasing corporatization of higher education. Today, American universities are responding to the demands of the marketplace, as knowledge is being used as a form of venture capital and where professors have become academic entrepreneurs and students have become consumers. The foregoing is made more complex as an increasingly diverse student pool seeks access to postsecondary education, in the face of federal policies that serve to restrict access and financial support. A discussion of the collateral costs of our corporate culture as we face challenges to access, equity, and opportunity in America in the twenty-first century concludes this paper.

This paper aims to present recently published resources on library instruction and information literacy providing an introductory overview and a selected annotated bibliography of publications covering all library types.

This paper introduces and annotates English-language periodical articles, monographs, dissertations, reports and other materials on library instruction and information literacy published in 2018.

The paper provides a brief description of all 422 sources, and highlights sources that contain unique or significant scholarly contributions.

The information may be used by librarians and anyone interested as a quick reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

This paper presents recently published resources on library instruction and information literacy, providing an introductory overview and a selected annotated bibliography of publications covering various library types, study populations and research contexts.

This paper introduces and annotates English-language periodical articles, monographs, dissertations, reports and other materials on library instruction and information literacy published in 2020.

The paper provides a brief description of all 440 sources and highlights sources that contain unique or significant scholarly contributions.

The information may be used by librarians, researchers and anyone interested in a quick and comprehensive reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

First-generation college students in the United States are a unique demographic that is often characterized by the institutions that serve them with a risk-laden and deficit-based model. However, our analysis of the transcripts of open-ended, semi-structured interviews with 22 “first-gen” respondents suggests they are actively deft, agentic, self-determining parties to processes of identity construction that are both externally imposed and potentially stigmatizing, as well as exemplars of survivance and determination. We deploy a grounded theory approach to an open-coding process, modeled after the extended case method, while viewing our data through a novel synthesis of the dual theoretical lenses of structural and radical/structural symbolic interactionism and intersectional/standpoint feminist traditions, in order to reveal the complex, unfolding, active strategies students used to make sense of their obstacles, successes, co-created identities, and distinctive institutional encounters. We find that contrary to the dictates of prevailing paradigms, identity-building among first-gens is an incremental and bidirectional process through which students actively perceive and engage existing power structures to persist and even thrive amid incredibly trying, challenging, distressing, and even traumatic circumstances. Our findings suggest that successful institutional interventional strategies designed to serve this functionally unique student population (and particularly those tailored to the COVID-moment) would do well to listen deeply to their voices, consider the secondary consequences of “protectionary” policies as potentially more harmful than helpful, and fundamentally, to reexamine the presumption that such students present just institutional risk and vulnerability, but also present a valuable addition to university environments, due to the unique perspective and broader scale of vision their experiences afford them.