Public Agenda surveyed Illinois residents to learn about how they view public higher education and what would help it serve them and the state better. Three research briefs highlight key findings from the broader survey findings. This brief finds that a large majority of Illinoisans believe higher education should be accessible, and many believe…

Purpose: This paper aims to consider the proliferation of journalistic articles that declare English Language Arts' death--Heller's 2023 The New Yorker piece "The End of the English Major" as a most recent iteration. It puts recent mainstream publications in conversation, reading them as a genre of elegies that, while largely discussing…

Although thousands of Iraqi refugees who worked with the Allied Forces during the Iraq war have been resettled in the United States, little is known about their experiences. In the aggregate, they are a well-educated, multilingual subset of refugees who aspire to earn college and higher education degrees. In this article, I draw from a series of…

Public Agenda surveyed Illinois residents to learn about how they view public higher education and what would help it serve them and the state better. Three research briefs highlight key findings from the broader survey findings. This brief finds that nearly three in four residents--including majorities of Democrats, independents and…

Higher education has often been accused of its anti-social character, represented by the metaphor of the 'ivory tower'. However, the idea of the pursuit of knowledge per se, which is associated with the ivory tower, has not been widely recognized as a public ideal of higher education. In this study, by drawing on the 20th-century British…

Public Agenda surveyed Illinois residents to learn about how they view public higher education and what would help it serve them and the state better. Three research briefs highlight key findings from the broader survey findings. This brief finds that 46% of Illinois residents do not have a post-secondary credential and are not currently enrolled…

Are the many crises of higher education real, or are they in the eye of the beholder? They are evidently something of both: The crises to which we are characteristically alerted are manifestations in the real of the world and indicate much about our scholars' perceptions and even their values. To say this, however, invites the question: can we…

In this article, Richard L Dunsworth, president of University of the Ozarks in Clarksville, Arkansas, having spent 25 years in the roles of oversight as consultant evaluator, team chair, advisory team member, peer evaluator, and member of the board of trustees for the largest institutional accreditor in the United States faces the same struggle…

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education has mostly focused on issues associated with teaching and assessment. In this paper I used AI to support the analysis of data which consisted of public comments on a newspaper article. This small, low risk research was chosen to demonstrate the potential use of AI and how it may support…

The peer assessment scores published annually by "U.S. News & World Report" ("USNWR") have fast become the de facto measure of institutional reputation in higher education. While higher education policymakers often use this score for benchmarking and performance-based funding purposes, relatively little is known about this…

This research examines a state-level response to national political movements to decentre whiteness in American social studies education. Aiming to better understand how emotions systemically sustain and build connections to whiteness, this emotion discourse analysis examined how fear and hope shaped the content of and support for legislation…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to offer direct tests of the effectiveness of renaming vocational education and training (VET) in enhancing the image and popularity of the subject. Although many proponents of renaming argue that the word "vocational" is associated with lower levels of skills and knowledge and should therefore be…

This is the summary for the white paper, "Complete College, America: Harnessing the Power of Higher Education to Renew American Democracy." The crisis facing American democracy and the challenges plaguing the U.S. higher education system are two sides of the same coin. Higher education is an engine for economic mobility. Median annual…

This study aims to investigate the public's perceptions regarding the integration of Generative AI (GenAI) in education by analysing comments on YouTube news clips. The study collected public comments from YouTube news clips disseminated by three prominent broadcasters in South Korea between December 2022 and June 2023. Two dimensions of public…

To understand the causes and consequences of polarized demand for government expenditure, we conduct three field experiments in the context of public higher education. The first two experiments study polarization in taxpayer demand. We provide information to shape beliefs about social returns on investment. Our treatments narrow the political…