USING ASYNCHRONOUS LEARNING IN REDESIGN: REACHING AND RETAINING THE AT-RISK STUDENT

Successful completion of introductory courses is critical for first-year students, but typical failure rates in these courses contribute heavily to overall institutional drop-out rates between the first and second year. Although success rates vary by institutional type and by subject matter, Research I universities commonly cite a 15 percent drop-failure-withdrawal (DFW) rate in introductory courses. Comprehensive universities’ DFW rates range from 22 percent to 45 percent in these courses. Community colleges frequently experience DFW rates of 40 percent to 50 percent or more.Most of the weaknesses attributed to large introductory courses are generic in nature and have as their source the limitations of the predominant form of instruction in U.S. colleges and universities: the didactic lecture. An overwhelming body of research shows that students do not learn effectively from lectures, and testimony from the field corroborates the literature.

The Impact of Tuition Increases on Enrollment at Public Colleges and Universities

In this paper we review recent increases in tuition at public institutions and estimate impacts on enrollment. We use data on all U.S. public 4-year colleges and universities from 1991 to 2006 and illustrate that tuition increased dramatically beginning in the early part of this decade. We examine impacts of such increases on total enrollment and credit hours, and estimate differences by type of institution. We estimate that the average tuition and fee elasticity of total headcount is -0.0958. At the mean, a $100 increase in tuition and fees would lead to a decline in enrollment of about 0.25 percent, with larger effects at Research I universities. We find limited evidence that especially large tuition increases elicit disproportionate enrollment responses.

Patenting productivity and intellectual property policies at Research I universities: An exploratory comparative study.

In the 1980s, the US government encouraged the cooperation of industries with universities in order to bridge funding gaps and cope with global competitive markets through legislations that allow universities to start spin-off businesses and to generate profits from patents. At the turn of the century, university partnerships with the private sector have greatly increased through research grants, licensing patents, and in some cases, the formation of new firms'mainly at research universities and in the hard sciences. In response to these entrepreneurial opportunities, university administrators developed intellectual property policies to facilitate the commercialization of research. The purpose of this study is to explore the differences across IP policies among nine research universities as potential sources of influence on faculty engagement in for-profit research ventures according to existing models of faculty role performance and achievement.

Publication Patterns of U.S. Academic Librarians from 1993 to 1997

This study examined the contribution to the peer-reviewed literature of library and information science by practicing academic librarians in the United States. Data on authors were obtained from articles published from 1993 to 1997 in thirty-two journals. Of 3,624 peer-reviewed articles in these journals, 1,579 (43.6%) were authored by at least one practicing academic librarian. These librarians represented 386 institutions of higher education. This study provides benchmark data for publication productivity of academic librarians and identifies a core list of peer-reviewed journals for them. Approximately six percent of these librarians wrote three or more articles in the five-year period. In nineteen journals one-third or more of the articles were authored by academic librarians. Libraries from Research I universities that were members of the Association for Research Libraries were the most productive. The contribution of practicing academic librarians to the literature of their field is significant.