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Higher Education Research

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a $699,000 grant for research and training in higher education economics to the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute (CHERI).

Ronald G. Ehrenberg, CHERI's director and Cornell's Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics, said the four-year grant allows continued flexibility in the study of a wide range of higher education issues.

In the next year, he said, three projects are slated to go forward through the Mellon funding.  They are:

  • Determining if gender composition of top academic administrators, college and university trustees and trustee board chairs influences the rate at which colleges and universities diversify faculty across gender lines.
  • Exploring the role of non-instructional spending by colleges and universities on graduation and retention rates of lower-income students and other underrepresented populations.
  • Testing whether state Bundy Aid awards are positively linked to transfer and graduation rates of college and university students.
CHERI has received Mellon Foundation funding since 1998.

Through undergraduate and graduate research positions created at CHERI by its grants, the Mellon Foundation has helped to prepare many students for positions as higher education faculty members and policymakers, Ehrenberg said.

The Mellon grants give CHERI flexibility to study a wide range of higher education issues including:

  • implications of growing wealth disparities across academic institutions
  • growing costs and importance of science to universities
  • financial challenges facing public higher education
  • changing nature of faculty
  • governance in academic institutions
  • improving doctoral education in the humanities and associated social sciences
  • improving persistence rates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics  majors
  • reducing inequality in higher education access and persistence.

The flexibility to move across topics is especially important during this period of economic decline, Ehrenberg said.

"There is going to be a fundamental change in how both public and private higher education institutions operate over the next decade and the pressures that they will face from both the federal and state governments," he said.

More information about The Mellon Foundation, based in New York City, can be seen at www.mellon.org.

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