This paper examines differences between the decision-making of marginal and nonmarginal students about participation in higher education (HE). We distinguish between two kinds of marginality: being "borderline" on account of prior achievements in school and being "unsure" after taking prior achievement into account. We identify a significant…

My dissertation examines the effectiveness of three policy choices in meeting socio-economic goals. The first analyzes the impact of public health education and poverty relief on child mortality in the early twentieth century, when infant and child mortality rates in the United States were startlingly high. During the 1920s, the rates dropped…

In 2000, the California State Legislature passed the Schiff-Cardenas Crime Prevention Act, which authorized funding for county juvenile-justice programs and designated the Corrections Standards Authority (CSA) (formerly named the Board of Corrections) the administrator of funding. A 2001 California Senate bill extended the funding and changed the…

In 2011, the chief executives of the University of Minnesota and Minnesota State Colleges & Universities systems will leave their positions, along with the governor of the state. The state will continue to face fiscal challenges, and the campuses will have to figure out how to do more with less. As "Tribune" columnist Lori Sturdevant…

The CATO Institute's Policy Analysis "They Spend WHAT? The Real Cost of Public Schools" contends that the figures most commonly associated with spending on K-12 public education do not include all relevant expenditures. It also cites survey evidence suggesting that voters underestimate the cost of education and, when presented with a higher…

Government student loan schemes typically have implicit interest rate subsidies which, while these are a cost to taxpayers, they have the benefit of diminishing repayment burdens for graduates. Our goal is to illustrate the extent of both interest rate subsidies and repayment burdens with respect to Thailand's Student Loans Fund (SLF), using…

Many professors and administrators express a common complaint about how universities work--that employees and units are often charged fees for work or services they receive from other campus units. This practice, often called "chargebacks," is much misunderstood because it seems counterintuitive: If you are employed by the university, why should…

The advantages of video conferencing in educational institutions are well documented. Scholarly literature has indicated that videoconferencing technology reduces time and costs between remote locations, fill gaps in teaching services, increases training productivity, enables meetings that would not be possible due to prohibitive travel costs, and…

Financial accounting methods fall short of fully accounting for the relative sustainability of college and university operations. Management of social, environmental, and economic performance will be aided by changes to and new developments in financial accounting practices to complement other indicators of sustainability.

One of the major concerns in higher education is the need for more accountability on the part of institutions so that members of the public know what they are getting for their tax or tuition dollars. There has been increased call for institutions of higher education to improve their efficiency if they are to remain affordable. In this article,…

A methodology to develop an easy-to-use toolkit for the preliminary design of high performance schools in hot and humid climates was presented. The toolkit proposed in this research will allow decision makers without simulation knowledge easily to evaluate accurately energy efficient measures for K-5 schools, which would contribute to the…

In 2002-2003, 1 million students participated in AP by taking at least one exam. Five years later, nearly 1.6 million did--a 50+ percent increase. But is growth all good? Might there be a downside? Are ill prepared students eroding the quality of the program? Perhaps harming the best and brightest? To find out, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute…

In the United States, 21% of all energy is used in residential buildings (40% of which is for heating and cooling homes). Promising improvements in residential building energy efficiency are underway such as the Building America Program and the Passive House Concept. The ability of improving energy efficiency in buildings is enhanced by building…

This paper describes the scope and outcomes of Virtual TAU, a campus-wide project that aims to integrate information and communication technologies into the academic instruction at Tel Aviv University (TAU). It provides data, insights, and conclusions drawn from various research and evaluation studies that were conducted at the university during…

This conceptual article relates a best-practice paradigm for undergraduate faculty who teach relatively large, undergraduate, general education courses and utilize an undergraduate teaching assistant (TA). Suggested characteristics for successful TAs are related as well as intrinsic and extrinsic motivators that help recruit quality assistants.…