Analyzing the Mix

The Cornell Higher Education Research Institute (CHERI) has received a Lumina Foundation for Education grant to analyze the impact of spending on non-instructional uses, such as student services, on persistence and graduation rates of students with different socioeconomic backgrounds and different academic qualifications.

The research will provide quantitative evidence on whether institutions can improve persistence and graduation rates by reallocating expenditures across different categories of uses, said Ronald G. Ehrenberg, one of the nation’s leading higher education researchers.

Ehrenberg is the director of CHERI and Cornell's Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics.

The focus will be on four-year colleges and universities with emphasis on those with students who come from lower-income families and have lower scores on college entrance examinations. "Of interest to us is whether academic institutions are using the expenditure mix that maximizes these students’ persistence and graduation," he said.

Lumina Foundation for Education works to ensure  that 60 percent of Americans are college-educated by 2025.   Its funding will supplement the core funding that CHERI has received from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Ehrenberg, in his proposal, described his interest in the research: "The United States no longer leads the world in terms of the share of our young adults with college degrees and inequality in access and persistence across various sociodemographic groups in the United States remains."

"Our nation's economic prosperity depends upon increasing the education levels of our population," he said.

Analyses of multiple data bases, he said, "will provide evidence of whether non-instructional expenditures 'matter' for different categories of students and the extent to which reallocation of resources across categories would be predicted to lead to higher persistence and graduation rates."

The impact of the research, Ehrenberg said, will be on institutional decision making at public and private colleges and universities with the goal of having resources reallocated to increase persistence and graduation rates

Sources of the data will include information collected by the U.S Department of Education, the College Board, the Pell Grant Program, Cornell University and Ohio public universities' administrative data bases and the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshman.

Founded in 1998, CHERI conducts interdisciplinary research on higher education. Reducing inequality in access to and persistence in higher education is one of the issues it addresses.

CHERI produces working papers, sponsors conferences --  many which have led to published volumes -- conducts surveys, and provides research opportunities for Cornell undergraduate and graduate students.

More information about CHERI can be found at www.ilr.cornell.edu/cheri.