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Higher Education in Review (HER) is an independent, refereed journal published by graduate students of the Higher Education Program at the Pennsylvania State University.  

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NEW BOOK REVIEW!


Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, reviewed by Pamela C. Snyder.

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Is College Worth It? What Different Groups of 10th Graders Know About College

By William Eger, University of Pennsylvania


This blog addresses the concept of "undermatching," discussing the author's conversations with students in Philadelphia-area high schools about their expectations of the application process for college.




NEW ONLINE PIECE

Performance Funding in the States: An Increasingly Ubiquitous Public Policy for Higher Education

By Amy Y. Li, University of Washington

This paper provides a comprehensive literature review of past and current topics in performance funding, such as performance metrics, policy design, institutional knowledge, and institutional responses. Specific state examples, including Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and Washington, illustrate main points about policy implementation and impacts. Unintended consequences of performance-based funding are also discussed by exploring troublesome examples of policy “side effects”. This paper concludes with major policy and practice recommendations from the literature.

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International Student Diversification and the High-Tuition High-Aid Model

By Tiffany Viggiano, University of California, Riverside

Although we typically discuss international students as one group, it is important to keep in mind that these students are not one uniform population (Levin, 2012). . . . Presently, the high-tuition, high-aid model does not account for the need to diversify international students, but it could. Diversifying international students would stay true to the mission of diversity and access in a global sense.

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SUBMISSIONS ARE BEING ACCEPTED FOR VOLUME 12!






Affirmative Action as a Precarious Value

By Frank Fernandez, The Pennsylvania State University
Excerpt: "Why is it that instead of growing more sacred with time, affirmative action is repeatedly attacked (first in Bakke, then Grutter, and now Fisher—not to mention state bans such as California’s Proposition 209 and Michigan’s Proposal 2)? America is still plagued with inequality and intolerance, but the question remains, why have some efforts toward equality been more accepted than others?"

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The Difficulty in Data: A Look at How Used Car Lots Can Help to Explain Challenges Facing Obama’s College Ratings System

By Justin Ortagus, The Pennsylvania State University






Excerpt:

"Since most people don’t profess to be automotive experts, we often rely on the sticker price to serve as an informal indicator of a car’s quality.  Colleges and universities work in a similar way.  Even if an institution’s U.S. News & World Report ranking drops, its tuition usually increases for the same reason consumers pay a premium for luxury cars: the price of a product is viewed as an informal indicator of its quality.  To lower tuition would be to signify a drop in academic quality.  Since Obama’s college ratings system is intended to assess value and inform policy, it should be distinct from U.S. News & World Report’s rankings.  Despite claims to the contrary, the general college ratings plan proposed by the White House has metrics that overlap with U.S. News & World Report’s rankings data and could serve to offer further advantages for already advantaged institutions."

BOOK REVIEW


Generation on a Tightrope: A Portrait of Today's College Student, reviewed by Shelley Errington Nicholson.

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