The purpose of this study is to characterize the graduate education development for creating world-class universities from the insight of the doctoral education in China. A systematic review is applied to examine the doctoral education development in contemporary China. The findings argue that there are tremendous challenges in China's current…

University ranking systems influence a wide range of educational stakeholders, including students, faculty members, and campus administrators. Of these ranking systems, the "U.S. News & World Report" ranking of colleges and universities has been the subject of much research. However, little research has examined specific "U.S.…

This article seeks to shed light on current dynamics of stratification in changing higher education and proposes an analytical perspective to account for these dynamics based on Martin Trow's work on "the analysis of status." In research on higher education, the term "stratification" is generally understood as a metaphor that…

The purpose of this case study was to explore faculty members' perceptions of the QEP in a public doctoral university with highest research activity. Particularly, the study explored how faculty members perceive the role of the QEP in student learning and institutional effectiveness, the relevance of the QEP activities in student learning and…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the ways in which universities use the "GRE"® General Test scores to award merit-based fellowships to first-year graduate students in doctoral programs. While GRE use in fellowship award decisions is a common practice, there is very little validity evidence to support its use in this context.…

During the past 3 decades dozens of studies have ranked schools of social work using faculty productivity or program reputation to gauge program quality. These studies are often controversial because they rely on only a few dimensions of schools' performance. This study used publicly available admissions data from the past 15 years to examine how…

Being a professional stems not only from external regulatory and eligibility guidelines, but also from an individual's willingness to internalise and apply the values and insight gained during their training. Increasingly, professionals are expected to undertake ongoing education and training that is now seen as an integral component of…

Evidence is presented both for and against the proposition that innovation is punished by surveys that rank academic quality. Systematic work is needed to show how innovation, experimentation, and lack of orthodoxy in research and teaching affect Ph.D. programs' ratings in academic quality rankings. (Author/MLW)

The five-volume Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States, the most authoritative academic quality ranking ever done, is discussed. The Assessment covers 2,699 programs in 32 disciplines and assesses a faculty's reputation for scholarly quality. Improvements in programs' reputations are also discussed. (MLW)

Journal publication frequencies of faculty members (N=892) of 81 doctorate-granting special education programs were analyzed with program reputational rankings. Mean program and per-capita frequencies over 5 years were 17.06 and 1.60 (respectively) and correlated positively but weakly with reputational rankings, suggesting that reputation is only…

Maintains that early sociological studies of U.S. higher education noted that despite a widespread ideology of egalitarianism, both individuals and departments were highly stratified. Reports on a study of changes in the structure of the stratification system in sociology over the past 30 years. (CFR)

A LISREL analysis demonstrates the value of regressing reputational ratings on three latent variables: size, faculty research productivity, and the quality of program graduates. The model was tested using National Research Council data for each of six disciplines: English, French, philosophy, geography, political science, and sociology.…

The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), the academic consortium of twelve research universities located in eight midwestern states, piloted the Summer Research Opportunities Program (SROP) in 1986 to encourage minority students to consider graduate education and help them prepare for the graduate admissions process. In addition to SROP,…

A study investigated the factors influencing the decision of 180 doctoral students in higher-education administration to apply to their current institutions. Factors found particularly important to students of color included academic reputation and faculty friendliness, in addition to those factors rated as important by students in general. (MSE)

A modified Delphi technique was used to identify the factors that positively influence technology education teachers' decision to enroll in graduate education programs and the barriers to their enrollment in advanced degree programs. Two pairs of Delphi panels were established. The doctoral panels consisted of 15 recent doctoral graduates and 30…