When confronted with the problems of urban school districts, such as an ever-increasing achievement gap, the underfunding of school districts, increased shortages of qualified teachers, greater emphasis on accountability, and the loss of public confidence, African American superintendents have considerable difficulty leading their school…

The concept of student engagement is receiving increased attention from researchers, higher education leaders, and the general public in recent years. This increased attention represents a shift from the more traditional "resource and reputation" model of academic quality to a model that emphasizes institutional best practices and student…

Every college and university experiences some form of financial hardship at one time or another. The financial problems plaguing local and state governments in recent years have been sufficient by themselves to create serious problems for institutions across the country. At the very least, an institution's financial difficulties can lead to the…

This article argues that developing technologies have resulted in rapid and fundamental changes in the way libraries conduct business. It is argued that, in light of these changes, academic librarians need to reconfigure the way their time and resources are allocated in order to assist users in making the most effective use of networked…

EDUCAUSE inaugurated its annual Current Issues Survey in 2000 by asking the primary representatives, typically CIOs, of its member institutions to identify up to three critical IT issues (five starting in 2004) from among 30 to 40 in response to each of four questions. The survey response rate has typically been 35 to 40 percent, with a…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to review the literature which focuses on four major higher education decision problems. These are: resource allocation; performance measurement; budgeting; and scheduling. Design/methodology/approach: Related articles appearing in the international journals from 1996 to 2005 are gathered and analyzed so that…

This study incorporated institutional characteristics (e.g., Carnegie type, selectivity) and resource allocations (e.g., instructional expenditures, student affairs expenditures) into a statistical model to predict undergraduate graduation rates. Instructional expenditures, library expenditures, and a number of institutional classification…

This paper explores the issue of how a country for which the prioritization of public spending towards poverty reduction is a key policy concern can monitor the distributional effects of public spending. Employing standard benefit-incidence analysis, this paper empirically examines how public education spending is currently distributed in Yemen.…

This paper examines institutional change in universities from the perspective of the notion of "boundaries". The paper asks: how can some of the most important regulatory and administrative changes in universities be understood in the framework of evolving boundaries? Two areas are studied empirically. First, the third mission of…

There has developed moderate discussion in European higher education about the use of performance indicators for both accountability and evaluation purposes. This paper begins by summarizing governmental expectations, institutional objections, and several of the controversies surrounding performance measures. We then report on using performance…

In the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which is an international comparative learning assessment measuring young people's knowledge and skills, Finland has been ranked at the top in the two rounds conducted and reported so far. In this article, the authors examine the discourses within which Finland's PISA results have been…

We measure the distributive justice preferences of students within eight departments in the faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Turku, Finland. We use the Finnish government's annual budget and its specific appropriations as a proxy to measure the students' underlying preferences. We test whether the type of studies of the respondents…

The University of Chicago holds the charter for and runs four independent public schools. As a charter school operator, the University of Chicago is investing considerable resources in the venture, in faculty time and expertise, back-office support, and fundraising. It's also putting the highly selective university's good name on the line. The…

Different historical contexts endow educational fairness with different historical missions. The operation of resource allocation powers, the introduction of new elements into strata polarization, and the authoritative allocation of public policies all add to the complexity of interpreting educational fairness. The key problem, however, does not…

The inadequacy of present-day public school financial and performance reporting restricts policymakers. With existing spending and activity information now generally available, public officials can determine only overall education resource levels and make allocative decisions only among gross input categories such as relative amounts of labor and…