Research
The Foundation's "In-House" Research Capacity
In 1988, the Mellon Foundation created an in-house research capacity that, while modest in size, has had a considerable impact. 1 This “capacity” is not a program initiative in the usual sense of the phrase, but it has had definite programmatic consequences. An early research project, the Bowen-Rudenstine study of PhD programs (In Pursuit of the PhD), provided the basis for the development of the Foundation’s Graduate Education Initiative (GEI), which lasted for ten years. Following the conclusion of that grantmaking program, the Foundation, under the leadership of Harriet Zuckerman, embarked on a multi-pronged analysis of the effects of the GEI and the lessons to be learned from it. This research has involved an elaborate analysis of completion rates and time-to-degree in the more than 50 leading departments in the humanities and related social sciences with which the Foundation worked closely, as well as data from another 50 departments that served as controls. Also, the Foundation funded an extensive survey of the graduate students in the GEI that has led to the creation of a database that will permit Ms. Zuckerman and her colleagues to examine graduate students’ reflections on their education, including the factors that facilitated and inhibited their pursuit of the PhD as well as their experiences when they entered the labor market. (Professor Ronald Ehrenberg of Cornell University is working with Ms. Zuckerman, Jeffrey Groen, and Sharon M. Brucker in writing up the findings.) The findings of this new research, in turn, are already affecting the way the Foundation supports graduate education in the humanities and related social sciences.
Similarly, the publication in 1992 of a Mellon study authored by Anthony Cummings and others of worrisome trends affecting research libraries (University Libraries and Scholarly Communication) stimulated much of the thinking that led to the creation of JSTOR. Roger Schonfeld’s subsequent publication (JSTOR: A History), then provided an account of lessons learned from the creation of what has proved to be a path-breaking digital resource. Kevin Guthrie’s book on The New-York Historical Society (The New-York Historical Society: Lessons from One Nonprofit’s Long Struggle for Survival) and Jed Bergman’s study of independent research libraries (Managing Change in the Nonprofit Sector), both products of a comprehensive examination of nonprofit organizations conducted during the 1990s, continue to have a major impact on how both grantees and grantmakers, including this Foundation, think about the sustainability of not-for-profit organizations.
The Foundation’s research on race-sensitive admissions policies in academically selective colleges and universities (Bowen and Bok, The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions), was cited extensively in the US Supreme Court 2003 decisions on the legality of the University of Michigan’s affirmative action programs. This research has also encouraged the Foundation to pursue a wide range of grantmaking programs designed to reduce racial disparities in higher education. Similarly, the study of the history of the private Historically Black Colleges and Universities by Henry Drewry and Humphrey Doermann (Stand and Prosper) helped to inform the Foundation’s grantmaking program that seeks to strengthen these important educational institutions.
To give a very different example of the effects of this research capacity, the College Sports Project (CSP), established in June 2003 under the leadership of Eugene Tobin, is an outgrowth of two Foundation-conducted studies of the impact of trends in college sports on educational values (Shulman and Bowen, The Game of Life, and Bowen and Levin, Reclaiming the Game). As explained elsewhere on this Web site, CSP is a collaborative effort among a large number of the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) Division III colleges and universities that seek to achieve two critical objectives: (1) greater “representativeness”—athletes should be representative of their classmates in academic outcomes and should be actively engaged in multiple facets of campus life; and (2) greater “integration”—coaches and athletic staff should be more fully integrated into campus life and given greater opportunities to enhance the educational experiences of a wide range of students.
The most recent study to result from the Foundation’s in-house research (Bowen, Kurzweil and Tobin, Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education) places special emphasis on the complementarities between the goals of “excellence” (educating large numbers of students to a high standard and advancing knowledge) and “equity” (extending opportunity). This publication has been well received and has reinforced—together with other developments operating in concert—an active interest within higher education in finding ways to increase the number of students from lower socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds who graduate from four-year colleges and universities.
The most fundamental barriers to graduating larger numbers of students from modest backgrounds exist at pre-collegiate level. They result from the long-lasting effects of differences in family circumstances on health, residential patterns, aspirations, and schooling opportunities. Fortunately, more and more research is being done on these factors, and, basic as they are, they are not subjects on which we have particular expertise. We are better positioned to address issues within higher education, and even within this more limited territory, careful “picking and choosing” of research questions is essential. Broadly speaking, there are three links in the collegiate part of the opportunity chain: (1) building pools of candidates by identifying and recruiting a larger number of credible applicants from modest backgrounds (defined according to both family income and parental education); (2) admitting and enrolling more of the promising low SES students who apply; and (3) successfully educating these matriculants, with “success” defined not just in terms of graduation rates (though that is, in some respects, primary) but also in terms of decisions concerning their fields of study and academic achievements (grades, honors, etc). 2
All three of these links are important, and we recognize that different links may be especially relevant in particular settings. In general, however, we are inclined to attach highest priority to the third link: increasing the odds of “success” in educating those who matriculate—which involves in part increasing persistence and raising graduation rates. In our view, there has been some tendency, mainly because of political pressures, to overstate the importance of initial access to higher education—enrollment per se—and to understate the importance of educational attainment—doing well academically and earning a BA degree. Socio-economic status has major effects on attainment, even after controlling for differences in access.
In our current research, we are particularly interested in understanding better the factors that affect the academic success of students from lower SES backgrounds who attend selective public universities. These institutions are tremendously important to the country in part because of the large number of students that they educate and in part because of the leadership that they and their alumni provide. Traditionally, these universities have been expected to play a major role as “engines of opportunity.” The public universities are also of great interest from the standpoint of research because they themselves differ substantially, they enroll very diverse student populations (in part because of their geographic spread), and students within a single public university can have a wide range of educational experiences. The Foundation has focused much of its research on the private sector of higher education, and we think the time is right to extend this work to the public sector.
One major finding from the Equity and Excellence study highlights the importance of studying the third link in the opportunity chain within the public sector. Overall, graduation rates at the leading public universities are moderately high, which is the good news. However, graduation rates for students from low SES backgrounds at these universities are significantly lower than graduation rates for other students, even after controlling for differences in variables such as SAT scores, race, field of study, and patterns of athletic recruitment. In Equity and Excellence we explored some of the possible explanations, including commuting patterns, work obligations, financial resources, and sense of “comfort,” but all in a rather speculative mode. We are now actively engaged in addressing these questions in appreciably more depth. We are seeking to analyze transfer patterns (to the extent they can be determined by using data from the National Student Clearinghouse), the roles played by race and gender (which we did not explore in any depth in Equity and Excellence and which clearly deserve far more attention than we gave them), and the effects of different levels of pre-collegiate preparation, financial aid in college (including the mix of grant aid, loans, and work opportunities given to various students), and family circumstances. We are also interested in learning more about the effects of institutional factors such as the presence or absence of honors colleges, advising structures, and the like. We believe that “supply side” variables such as faculty staffing, availability of courses, and residential arrangements, can be very important in determining outcomes. We have been able to enlist the active participation of approximately 20 leading public universities, and we have made substantial progress in collecting record-level data for the ’99 entering cohort of matriculants and in linking these data to information on student backgrounds maintained by the College Board and by the ACT.
One important by-product of this new research will be a major enhancement of the Foundation’s College and Beyond (C&B) database. This database was originally created to make possible the Foundation’s research on race-sensitive admissions and college sports; it was then used as the basis for the empirical findings on opportunity reported in Equity and Excellence. This database, which now includes over 275,000 student records spanning four decades, as well as information on applicants and on the career paths of some matriculants, has become widely recognized as a resource for scholars who are interested in a broad range of outcomes associated with admission and enrollment at selective colleges and universities. New research concerning the highly charged subject of differences in career paths associated with gender will depend heavily on the C&B database and its possible extensions—to cite just one additional example. When scholars request access to the C&B database, their requests are reviewed by a committee chaired by Michael McPherson, president of the Spencer Foundation. Needless to say, we place great emphasis on respecting limitations on access to these data imposed by particular institutions and on protecting the confidentiality of both the records of individual students and outcomes at particular colleges and universities.
Finally, mention should be made of the relationship between the Foundation’s in-house research and numerous research projects supported by Foundation grants that complement the Foundation’s own studies and help the scholarly community build a more comprehensive set of findings on subjects of interest. For example, the Foundation recently made a grant to Nancy Cantor of Syracuse University and Debbie Prentice of Princeton University to carry out a more qualitative study of factors leading to attrition in public universities. The Cantor-Prentice research will build on, and add to, the Foundation’s ongoing empirical analysis of graduation rates at selective public universities.
