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DIRECTIONS
Cover story photos courtesy of MESA.
• The USC Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis
Published by CHEPA
Volume 1 • Issue 1 • Fall 2001
the
AND TRENDS IN HIGHER
EDUCATION POLICY
WANTED: Tools to Measure College Prep Success
F
By Anneliese M. Bruner
or more than a quarter century, college access programs have toiled away on the margins of higher
education in an effort to compensate for the myriad
problems that confront urban schools. Typically staffed by
sincere, hard-working individuals, these modestly funded
programs have had one goal: to help participants, most of
whom are urban teens, get into college. Since so much of
this work is done on shoestring budgets, however, little
money has been available to develop effective systems of
program evaluation. Program directors, policy makers and
funding agents, therefore, know little about which of these
programs and strategies are effective and which are not.
The national movement to reverse affirmative action
and growing concerns about the lack of diversity on college
campuses have triggered an upswing in college access programs. Educators, policy makers and funding agents are
eager to maximize their performance by identifying effective tools with which to evaluate college access programs.
The University of Southern California’s Center for
Higher Education Policy Analysis (CHEPA), has long invested in college prep research. In recent years, it has identified
programs and categorized them by type. Now, Drs. William
G. Tierney, center director, and Linda Serra Hagedorn, asso-
ciate director, are among a handful of experts leading the
national effort to design new evaluation tools.
“We now know what doesn’t work,” Tierney says. “We
intend to spend the next few years outlining the specifics of
what does work, and how to implement what works.”
Tierney and Hagedorn have not only co-authored a
new book featuring insights from key researchers and practitioners on the subject of college access programs, but
Tierney is leading a team to create an evaluation prototype
for use by one of California’s most esteemed access programs. The latter project is supported by a 3-year, $1.24
million grant from the U.S. Department of Education.
Over the years, most of the resources available to
college prep programs have been directed toward programmatic elements. The main benchmark of success
was whether students enrolled in and were exposed to
the program.
“Programs claim a success rate of 80 or 90 percent,” Tierney says. “The problem is that these numbers are based on shifting sands.” In order to gauge success more accurately, CHEPA is involved in a longitudinal project to work with practitioners in the creation
of more accurate and meaningful assessment measures.
The Map
THE COMPASS . . . . . . . . . .2
A note from the director.
ON THE RIM . . . . . . . . . . .3
Meet CHEPA’s new partners in Melbourne,
Australia.
CHEPA WIRE . . . . . . .2,5,6
Updates on research, grants and other
center developments.
Continued on page 4
NEW VOICES . . . . . . . . . . .7
CHEPA alumni are on the move.
FAST FORWARD . . . . . . . . .8
OFF THE SHELF . . . . . . . . . .6
Books, films, Web sites, etc...
Events to mark on your calendar.
C
e
Anonymous Donor
Grants $1.8 Million for
Governance Project
F
or the past decade, shared governance has been a hot topic in higher
education, as colleges and universities have scrambled to create better systems of
accountability and management without
impeding academic freedom amid an
increasingly fast-paced and complex post secondary environment. As robust as these conversations have been, much of the focus has
been on leadership and policy related issues,
such as student assessment, tenure and
accreditation. Little of the discussion or
research has centered on internal and external governance structures.
Now, thanks to a $1.8 million, three-year
grant from an anonymous donor, the Center for
Higher Education Policy Analysis (CHEPA) will
embark on a study designed to provide higher education with a set of recommendations for improving decision-making structures and accountability
at 21st century four-year institutions.
“We’re excited about the project because it
allows us to expand work that we’ve been
doing on a smaller scale for several years to a
scale that can have real depth and impact,” says
William G. Tierney, CHEPA director. “It is
not often that a center like ours is fortunate
enough to have such a generous benefactor
who not only shares our vision, but is willing to
support such an extensive and important project without seeking recognition.”
Many of the systems of governance currently used by post secondary institutions were
created in the late 19th and early 20th century.
While some of these are still appropriate and relevant to 21st century realities, others are obsolete. Technology, increased enrollment, the
expanding range of institutional types and
heightened institutional competition are just a
few of the dynamics transforming higher education. Together with evolving perspectives on
tenure, academic freedom, and racial and gender diversity, these dynamics demand a new
generation of governance structures.
Among the issues researchers will examine during the study are:
the Compass▼
As director of the Center for Higher Education Policy
Analysis at the University of Southern California’s Rossier
School of Education, it is my pleasure to welcome you to the
inaugural edition of our newsletter!
When CHEPA was launched in 1994, ideas such as “globalization” and “the Pacific Rim” were sketchy; there was a firewall between K-12 and post secondary education; and no one
could have predicted the ubiquitous rise of the Internet.
Fortunately, we were in Los Angeles and at USC.
LA is on the Rim and USC is on the move. We started CHEPA intending to
advance new ideas in new ways. We brought in funding from the Ford Foundation, the
Pew Endowment, and the Irvine Foundation as well as the state and federal government.
Our goal is to suggest research-based solutions that will enable schools and
post secondary institutions to develop more effective relationships, to increase
opportunities for low-income urban youth to attend college, and to develop
stronger, systemic relationships with our neighbors on the Rim so that greater communication, understanding and opportunities occur.
Over the years, the research produced by CHEPA scholars has drawn recognition
and respect from key policy makers, researchers and practitioners nationwide. Dr. Linda
Hagedorn, our associate director, has won the Early Career Research Award from the
Association for the Study of Higher Education and Dr. Estela M. Bensimon and I have
been awarded Fulbrights to Mexico and Australia respectively.
As proud as we are of these achievements, we recognize that the circle of people who are interested in and can benefit from our work is broader than our past
outreach efforts have extended. The Navigator is a logical next step in our ongoing
efforts to connect with an even wider swath of the education community.
In each edition, we will offer a glimpse at the types of activities being pursued by
CHEPA researchers; policy perspectives on national education issues; news about the
grants and gifts that enable us to do this important work; and profiles on the achievements of our alumni, among other information that we hope will enrich your work.
The cover story in this inaugural edition highlights research CHEPA is pursuing to develop practical evaluation instruments for use by college access programs.
As the demand grows for programs that better equip under represented students for
college enrollment, CHEPA aims to provide program coordinators, funding organizations and policy makers with better instruments for determining whether these
programs are achieving their intended goals.
In this edition you’ll also learn about a new $1.8 million grant the center
received from an anonymous donor, a partnership we’ve developed with a peer
institution in Melbourne, Australia, and a project we hope will assist community
colleges in enhancing the success rate of their students.
As an avid hiker, there are two things I always try to have before setting out on
a trek: a compass, so that I always know which direction I’m heading; and a map,
to have an overview of the terrain I’m venturing into and an idea of alternate routes
in case something unexpected occurs along the path I’ve chosen.
As you negotiate the challenging landscape of 21st century higher education, we
hope you’ll count The Navigator among the resources you consider indispensable.
We also invite you to check out our Web site at www.usc.edu/dept/chepa. Send us
your comments about both so that we’ll know whether we’re on the right path. N
PA Wir
HE
2
▼
William G. Tierney
Wilbur-Kieffer Professor of Higher Education & Director
Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis
Rossier School of Education
University of Southern California
the Navigator • Fall 2001
•
What are the institutional implications
of distance learning?
•
How will institutions shift from facultycentered to learner-centered environments and what are the implications for
faculty work, roles and rewards?
Continued on page 8
CHEPA FORGES PARTNERSHIP
BY SHERRY TIGGETT
•
The design and implementation of quality
assurance policies and processes, particularly those concerned with the quality of
teaching and learning;
•
The changing work roles, career paths
and professional development needs of
the academic profession; and
•
Approaches to monitoring and improving
the student experience including the management of transitions and the first- year
experience.
n t he R
Photo courtesy of CSHE.
O
AUSTRALIAN PEER
IM
T
he Center for Higher Education Policy
Analysis (CHEPA) has forged a firsttime collaboration with the University of
Melbourne’s Centre for the Study of Higher
Education (CSHE) in Australia.
The primary objective of the alliance is to
strengthen ties between both centers for the
purposes of teaching and learning, student
experience, and professional development of
scholars. The center directors also intend the
arrangement to stimulate an increase in policyoriented research that aims to improve higher
education in general and that of the Pacific
Rim in particular; and to encourage the two
institutions to pursue research and development initiatives jointly.
“I’m excited about [the arrangement]
because it provides CHEPA faculty members
and graduate students with a challenging
opportunity to test their ideas and hypotheses
in a whole new environment,” says Dr.
William Tierney, CHEPA director. “If we’re
really serious about shaping policies that will
equip our institutions to operate competitively, yet credibly, in an ever more global learning environment, we must seek opportunities
to think and conduct research on an international scale.”
The idea for the alliance between the two
institutions began while Tierney was on a sabbatical leave earlier this year, pursuing a
Fulbright Fellowship in Australia. Part of his
time was spent at the University Melbourne.
“We discovered that we had a lot more in
common than we realized,” says Craig
McInnis, director of CSHE.
CSHE has been a national and international leader in higher education policy research and
educational development for more than 30 years.
It provides independent, research-based advice
and support in three principal areas:
WITH
CHEPA’s home away from home at the CSHE building in Melbourne, Australia.
CHEPA is an interdisciplinary research
unit of the Rossier School of Education at
USC that was established in 1994 to engage
the post secondary-education community
actively, and to serve as an important intellectual center. Its mission is to improve urban
higher education, strengthen school-university relationships, and to focus on international higher education with an emphasis on
Latin America and the Pacific Rim.
Among the research priorities of the new
collaboration will be projects that advance
knowledge and policy-making from a comparative perspective in four areas:
•
The improvement of academic work;
•
The enhancement of effective institutional governance and decision-making
structures and systems;
•
The improvement of learner-based strategies for curricular development; and
•
The analysis of how higher education in
the Pacific Rim might be improved by
way of increased coordination, research
and infrastructure.
One of the common denominators that
brought the two centers together is a shared
interest in the relationship between student
experiences and other important issues.
“[Today’s] students are more disengaged, in that they put college in a different
perspective than how we did 20 years ago,”
McInnis says. “Students spend less time on
campus and in class rooms,” for a variety of
reasons including working full-time jobs, and
the advent of computer/distance learning
courses.” The arrangement between the two
centers will give researchers on either campus
an opportunity to examine how these challenges manifest in another country.
For now, the ink is just drying on the
contract. No funding has been set aside nor
have any faculty proposals been submitted.
However, McInnis plans to be in the United
States in November trying to generate more
interest in the project and exploring options
for funding.
Ultimately, McInnis says he would like
the collaboration to become the authority on
providing international management & senior leadership programs for academics
throughout the Pacific Rim.
“By putting [our] intellectual resources
together, the research could lead to a reshaping and rethinking of higher education systems,” he says. N
▼
the Navigator • Fall 2001
3
WANTED: Tools to Measure College Prep Success
Continued from page 1
Hagedorn and Tierney hope the upcoming book Increasing Access to College:
Extending Possibilities for All Students, and
the work they are doing to create an evaluation
prototype will yield benefits for all of the stakeholders in the college preparatory community.
those of the world of practice. It also will urge
grant-makers and policy makers to be firm
but patient with practitioners as they adapt to
the new challenges and problems presented
by evaluation results.
“We have to be more proactive,”
Hagedorn argues, “so that practitioners are
able to use research findings, and researchers
are able to be engaged with the daily concerns
of those in the trenches.”
MARRYING RESEARCH WITH PRACTICE
4
▼
One of the problems with the few college
prep evaluation models that have been in
development in recent years is that they aren’t
perceived as practitioner friendly.
“You have to develop evaluative measures that are usable,” Tierney says. “We are
in an age of globalization where family relationships, school relationships are changing.
We need evaluation models that are suited to
this new reality.”
CHEPA’S work with California’s 30year-old Mathematics, Engineering, Science
Achievement program (MESA) is expected to
yield just such a prototype. Oscar Porter, associate director of research, evaluation and information management at MESA is among those
prep program administrators who welcome
the new focus on evaluation tools. He and
Tierney will co-direct the prototype project.
“Given that a lot of programs do not
know how to self-evaluate, and funders are
unsure what to ask, there needs to be a consensus about what you ought to do in terms of
evaluating a blueprint or scorecard,” he says.
“We hope to complete this project from the
practitioners’ viewpoint.”
Unlike many programs that have no evaluation tools, MESA has modest tools that simply
don’t go far enough. Ideally, cohort models
should enable practitioners to follow students
from high school through college to determine
what percentage actually go on to earn college
degrees. Up to now, however, even programs as
sophisticated as MESA have not been able to take
the cohort approach beyond the high school level.
the Navigator • Fall 2001
THE BASIC EVALUATION FRAMEWORK
So, what does a good evaluation model look
like? CHEPA research suggests that it should
first seek to answer three basic questions: Who
does the program serve? What are the indications
of programmatic success? And what are the indicators of organizational effectiveness?
The framework of the CHEPA model
includes five basic components:
Porter concedes that not everyone in the
college prep community shares his enthusiasm about the new focus on evaluation.
Historically, these programs have functioned
autonomously in the communities from
which they emerged. Many rely almost exclusively on external funding, but are skeptical
about, if not resistant to, external review
because they do not want outsiders treading
on their success and potentially jeopardizing
their funding.
“If a funder says, ‘We want a successful program,’ what they’re suggesting is
either you choose kids that are likely to
succeed or you fluff the data,” Tierney
says. Such considerations discourage practitioners from dealing with students who
might need more help and from using
more complex evaluation techniques.
Ultimately, CHEPA hopes to marry the
best practices from the research world with
•
Technology to capture and maintain
accurate records of enrollment and attrition of any given cohort;
•
A longitudinal comparative database
across organizations;
•
Multiple measures of effectiveness;
•
The analysis of one discrete evaluation
component each year; and
•
An ongoing schema for evaluating costs
and communicating effectiveness.
These components are outlined in further detail in Tierney’s chapter of Increasing
Access to College, which is scheduled for
release in January by SUNY Press.
Because the population of students
served by urban college prep programs typically has numerous needs (educational, social
C
WALKING
re
A Wi
HEP
THE
WALK ON
FACULTY DIVERSITY
BY CHERYL D. FIELDS
Recognized as a premier college prep program,
MESA seeks new evaluation model.
and economic), it is not uncommon for program administrators to spread their resources
in many directions. Tierney and his colleagues have generally found this practice to
be counterproductive.
“We cannot do everything,” he says.
Instead, practitioners should focus on providing
education skills and counseling services, and on
involving family members in program activities.
Hagedorn agrees that the emphasis must
be on academics.
“My work has specifically found that
programs without an academic component
are less effective than those with a strong
focus on this important aspect of student
life,” she says. “That is not to say that social
support networks or programs to keep students ‘off the street’ are misguided or ineffective. Rather, I found that programs whose
goal is to assist students to enroll in college
are more likely to achieve their objective if
they include an academic component.”
“And we need to wrap these activities in
cultural integrity, to honor the backgrounds of
these kids,” Tierney says. “If we focus on that
over time, these programs will have success.” N
–Cheryl D. Fields contributed to this article.
More details about college access evaluation
models can be found on the CHEPA Web
site: www.usc.edu/dept/chepa.
CHEPA Staff
Director: William G. Tierney, Ph.D.
Associate Director: Linda Serra Hagedorn, Ph.D.
Faculty: Estela M. Bensimon, Ph.D., director, CUE;
Michael L. Jackson, Ph.D., vice president
for student affairs; William Maxwell, Ph.D.,
associate professor; Melora Sundt, Ph.D.,
associate dean.
Administrative Coordinator: Angela Yvonne
Postdoctoral Researcher: Hye Sun Moon, Ph.D.
Research Assistants: Phil Brocato, Dean Campbell,
Julia Colyar, Zoe Corwin and Sion Lee
Intern: Nurgul Kinderbaeva
H
igher education’s focus on diversity in the past decade has concentrated primarily on increasing the ranks of students of color. The greatest successes, though
modest, have been at the undergraduate level. Over the years, CHEPA has
maintained that real change in campus diversity requires a deeper commitment.
In an effort to continue the University of Southern California’s movement
toward a more substantive diversity commitment, CHEPA Director William G.
Tierney co-wrote a proposal with Dr. George Sanchez, associate professor of history,
for a grant that would enable USC to increase the presence of under represented faculty and graduate students while also engaging the wider campus community around
diversity issues. “We believe that diversity begins at home,” Tierney says.
The James Irvine Foundation responded with a $3.6 million, 3-year grant.
CHEPA will receive $250,000 of these funds to serve as internal evaluator on the
project, which will be administered by Sanchez at the university’s new Center for
American Studies and Ethnicities.
“I think one expected outcome from this grant, that of preparing the next generation of faculty, is critical to the continued viability of higher education,” says Dr.
Karen Gallagher, dean of the Rossier School of Education. “But the tendency, at
majority [White] institutions, when you get a grant like this, is to say, ‘good, the burden of dealing with diversity is off of us now.’ That’s why having CHEPA’s expertise on the evaluation side is so critical.”
CHEPA’s goal is “to ensure that the project stays on target so that not only do
we increase the number of graduate students of color who become faculty, but we
increase dialogues about diversity on campus,” Tierney says.
One reason higher education continues to struggle with the diversity question is that
most predominantly White campuses have been satisfied that increasing the presence of
people of color on campus is all that is needed. In reality, it is only the first step.
“Once there, faculty and students of color must be able to affirm, rather than
reject who they are,” Gallagher says. Certainly, opportunities for this affirmation
improve as diversity increases, but institutions must take additional steps to ensure
that these opportunities are more than superficial.
“Minority faculty want to be involved in programs where they have access to and
can mentor graduate students of color,” Sanchez says. The new program includes
components designed to encourage this type of interaction. It also provides incentives
for faculty and students to collaborate on research and scholarship that addresses
urban issues, which should connect them to the surrounding community as well.
“Campuses should not be sites of assimilation, but instead, sites of contestation
and multiple interpretations,” Sanchez says. Which is why Gallagher expects
CHEPA’s involvement to ensure that conversations about diversity extend beyond
the fellows and faculty of color.
“We’ve got to figure out ways to have this discussion in a larger forum because
Whites have a responsibility in diversity as well,” she says.
Sanchez plans to involve the faculty, deans and the provost, all of whom have
demonstrated a willingness to buy into the program already by contributing funds to the
five-year graduate student fellowships.
In addition to broadening the pool of under represented faculty, Tierney,
Sanchez and Gallagher seek ultimately to effect systemic transformation at USC that
can serve as a model for other institutions to emulate.
“We’ll examine how all of this fits into the broader question of higher ed and
where it should be going,” Gallagher says. N
–Anneliese M. Bruner contributed to this article.
▼
the Navigator • Fall 2001
5
“The TRUCCS
project will highlight
and bring credit to
what our colleges are
successfully doing to
ensure student success,” says Dr. Daniel
Castro, president of the
Los Angeles Trade
Linda Serra Hagedorn, Ph.D.
Technical College, one
of the campuses included in the study. “It will
also identify what we need to do better and
presents tremendous potential for positively
informing our policies and practices for ensuring greater student success.”
TRUCCS will attempt to determine how
student goals and expectations align with
such measurable factors as the transfer rates
to four-year institutions, degree attainment,
the learning of new skills, or being promoted
at work. Hagedorn says getting a better handle on these factors is critical to creating
appropriate policies that will encourage community college enrollment and success. She
adds that the economic mobility that community colleges encourage is a critical component to channeling working poor people into
the middle class.
According to Hagedorn, current literature on community college students remains
sketchy and inconclusive, while the characteristics of the community college experience
The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding
Globalization
By Thomas L. Friedman
A lucid analysis of globalization that helps us think
through what’s happening and what’s not.
Paperback: $15.00
Anchor Books
6
▼
Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope
By Jonathan Kozol
An eloquent book about the challenges of public
schooling and what we should do.
Hardcover: $25.00
Crown Publishing
the Navigator • Fall 2001
CINEMA/PERFORMANCE
The Shape of Things
By Neil LaBute
A searing drama, soon to be staged in the U.S.,
about the shape of gender relations and the ongoing (re)definition of what is meant by “art.” The
play is written and directed by the same innovative
playwright/film director who gave us “In the
Company of Men” and “Nurse Betty.”
Commissioned by London’s Almeida Theatre
On The Web
www.epn.org
Sponsored by a consortium of top public policy
experts and advocacy groups, the Electronic Policy
Network is a useful Web site that helps us stay in
touch with important policy developments.
OFF THE
In order to create dynamic post secondary institutions, we need to get out of the higher ed box of literature
and stay informed about trends that influence higher education. Here are four recommendations:
BOOKS
C
are increasingly complex. Students come to
these “open-door” institutions not only from
a vast array of ethnic, age and educational
backgrounds, but also with a diverse range of
educational goals and needs.
“At USC, everybody in a course has
met the same criteria,” Hagedorn explains.
“At open-door institutions, anyone with a
high school diploma can take classes. The
more heterogeneous a set of students, the
more difficult it is for the faculty and
administration.”
Over the three-year grant period,
Hagedorn fully expects to find that many of the
students in the sample will not have completed
their goals. “Three years is an insufficient time
to trace community college students,” she says
because many have other responsibilities and
“studentship” is often secondary. For that reason, Hagedorn hopes to find additional funding to extend the longitudinal design for five or
even ten years.
The data generated by the TRUCCS
study also will be used by many of
CHEPA’s doctoral students. Ultimately,
the TRUCCS researchers want the project
to initiate change.
“I want the results of our work to be
widely disseminated so that it can benefit the
more than 5.6 million community college
students in the country,” Hagedorn says. N
— AMB
SHELF
A
s community college enrollment continues to grow in California and
nationwide, the need to identify factors that will contribute to the success of twoyear students becomes increasingly important.
Leading the way in new research about community college students is CHEPA researcher
and program chair of the Community College
Leadership Program, Associate Professor
Linda Serra Hagedorn, Ph.D.
Hagedorn’s familiarity and expertise
with community colleges date back to her
days as a community college student and
instructor in an occupational program. She
was recently awarded the directorship in a
three-year, $1.1 million project titled
Transfer and Retention of Urban
Community College Students, or TRUCCS
(pronounced “trucks”) as it is affectionately
referred to at CHEPA.
TRUCCS is the result of a collaboration
between Los Angeles’ three educational giants:
USC, UCLA and the Los Angeles Community
College District. TRUCCS will follow 5,000
community college students from the nine campuses of the Los Angeles Community College
District for three years. The study will investigate the factors (both organizational and individual) that promote success for community college students. Funding for the research is provided by a grant from the Field Initiated Studies
program of the U.S. Department of Education.
re
Federal Grant Drives New Research on Community College Students
A Wi
HEP
new
VOICES
ALUMNUS UNCOVERS
NEW PERSPECTIVES
ON
GAY STUDENT IDENTITY
W
hile trying to make sense of the college experience of non-heterosexual
males during his graduate research,
CHEPA alumnus Patrick Dilley, Ph.D., found
existing theory on how gay men understand
themselves to be inadequate. In his upcoming
book, Queer Man on Campus: A History of
Non-heterosexual College Men, 1945 to 2000,
scheduled for release by the end of the year, he
provides a bold new theoretical framework for
understanding gay male identity. The author
also is a newly appointed associate professor of
higher education at Southern Illinois University.
The 57 men in Dilley’s study had attended college between the years 1945 and 2000.
Initially, he used standard student identity development theory in an attempt to map
out the different concepts of identity among
the men he interviewed. He soon realized,
however, that the framework was too narrow
because it did not allow for how the men
made sense of their own identities. Instead of
honing in on the broader meaning that the
men attached to their sense of themselves and
to their experiences, the traditional framework focused only on what they thought of
themselves or what they did.
Frustrated by “a framework that essentialized identity based on sense and experience,” Dilley sought to capture “what something meant in their lives beyond their reason
at a particular time.”
From this work sprang the notion that
there are seven distinct gay identities or patterns of development that constitute the nonheterosexual male college experience. In
examining markers such as the patterns of
denial and rejection common in the ’40s and
’50s, the development of a “gay” identity in
the socially liberal ’60s and ’70s, and the rise
HELPING STUDENTS SURVIVE THE BARRIO
AND COLLEGE
W
ith a growing number of urban univerJun, who has lived in Los
sities engaging in or
Angeles for the last decade and is
expanding existing college prepaof Korean descent, found that
ration programs designed to help
despite the students’ confidence
inner city kids matriculate into
and academic commitment comcollege, some experts are quesing out of NAI, once in college
tioning the efficacy of these pro- Alexander Jun, Ph.D. they discovered that they were
grams. As a graduate student,
still less prepared than many of
CHEPA alumnus Alexander Jun, Ph.D., their peers. “Calculus at their high school
wondered how well students who’ve been was not of the same level as calculus taken
through these programs perform once in by other students at suburban high
college.
schools,” he says. And though the students
Jun’s new book, From Here to in his study struggled once in college, they
University: Access, Mobility and Resilience did not use the retention-focused programs
among Urban Latino Youth (Routledge that were available to them.
Press, 2001), provides compelling insights
Jun concludes that all college preparaon the topic by relating the experiences of tion programs (not just NAI) should require
five Latino students who enrolled at USC in students to participate in retention programs
1998 after participating in the university’s while in college to ensure greater retention
Neighborhood Academic Initiative (NAI).
and degree attainment. “This should be
Jun–who currently is assistant director done in a greater effort to create a seamless
for undergraduate programs and an transition between high school and college,
adjunct clinical professor at Rossier–fol- and to promote a spirit of collaboration
lowed the students, all of whom were NAI between K-12 and higher ed,” he says.
alumni and had graduated from the same
The book also urges programs like NAI
public high school in Los Angeles, over the to focus more intently on academic preparacourse of their sophomore and junior years. tion, while including a summer bridge comThe NAI program, had not only sup- ponent to help acclimate students to campus
ported the students academically, socially life prior to freshman year. It is equally
and culturally from the seventh through important that funding agents scrutinize
12th grades, but it had agreed to pay their how college preparatory programs are defincollege tuition as well, if they were admit- ing and measuring success, he says.
ted to the university under the normal aca“Success has got to be measured by
demic criteria.
college graduation.” N
— AMB
of “queers” in the ’80s, Dilley concludes that
while these domains have similarities they are
independent and varied. “In one identity
type, they thought of themselves as being like
everyone else, having sex with someone of the
same gender did not make them think of
themselves as being different,” he says.
Dilley hopes his work will provide student
development theorists and program administrators with a new paradigm through which to
study and design systems and programs to support gay students on college campuses. N
— AMB
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the Navigator • Fall 2001
7
Governance Project
Continued from page 2
•
What kind of new relationships with
external constituencies and across systems need to be created?
The study also will examine the role of
trustee boards and how higher education
should adapt to the closer alliances it is being
encouraged to form with K-12 institutions.
“Unfortunately, current forms of academic governance were created during times of
rapid growth and expansion in higher education,” Tierney says. This led to the creation of
systems designed to create standards, monitor
curricula and ensure that certain institutional
totems such as academic freedom were upheld.
“Such a culture is not receptive to an operating philosophy based on the creativity, innovation or timeliness that institutions now
need,” Tierney says. The project will involve
an overview study, site visits to representative
institutions and emblematic case studies of
governance structures that work and those
that do not. An advisory board of higher education researchers and leaders from a variety
of institutions and higher education associations also will consult on the project.
At the end of the three-year project,
CHEPA plans to host a working conference
at which the strategies for improvement will
be presented. N
— CDF
For more information about the governance
project, visit CHEPA’s Web site at
www.usc.edu/dept/chepa, or call 213/740-7218.
October
14
Fast
Forward
American Association of University Professors and the American Conference of
Academic Deans
At this conference titled “Mission and Governance: Integrating a Shared Vision,” Bill Tierney will present “Cultivating Faculty Leadership.”
Location: Howard University Law School, Washington, D.C.
Contact: Dori Binsted by email at: dbinsted@aaup.org
29
Japanese Association of Private Colleges and Universities
CHEPA hosts a meeting of this prestigious Pacific Rim group.
Location: University of Southern California
Contact: CHEPA at: 213/740-7218
31
Bill Tierney will speak on “Faculty Work and the Improvement of Teaching and Learning.”
Location: University of Wyoming
Oct.-Dec.
Transfer and Retention of Urban Community College Students
Linda S. Hagedorn and her TRUCCS colleagues will conduct focus groups with students, faculty and administrators at Los Angeles’ nine community colleges throughout the fall semester.
Contact: Linda S. Hagedorn at: 213/740-7218
November
15-18 Association for the Study of Higher Education
Julia Colyar and Bill Tierney will participate in symposia titled “Family Involvement in College
Preparation Program” and “Textual Representation in Higher Education Research and Policy
Studies.” Linda Hagedorn will present “Transfer Where You Least Expect It” and “The Quality of
Faculty and Administrative Worklife.” Other presenters include Laura Perna and Marvin Titus,
University of Maryland; and Michelle G. Knight, Teachers College, Columbia University.
Location: Omni Richmond Hotel and the Crowne Plaza, Richmond, VA
Contact: ASHE at: 573/882-9645, or visit www.ashe.missouri.edu/2001 conf.html
For updates to the calendar, visit CHEPA’s Web site at www.usc.edu/dept/chepa.
The Navigator is produced for CHEPA by Langhum Mitchell Communications.
CHEPA
WPH 701
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, California 90089-0031
The Navigator is made possible by a generous grant from the Ford Foundation.
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