FOR RELEASE: Nov. 20 1998
Contact: Linda Myers Office: (607) 255-9735Home: (607) 277-5035 E-Mail: [email protected] Compuserve: Bill Steele, 72650,565 http://www.news.cornell.edu
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Cornell University professor Ronald Ehrenberg has a vision: to use his experience as a top-level university administrator to help colleges and universities across the United States run better. "Ron is one of the smartest people I know and probably the single best professional student in this country on the economics of higher education," said Cornell Provost Don M. Randel. After Ehrenberg stepped down from his position as Cornell's vice president for academic programs, planning and budgeting last June, Randel urged the economics professor to make use of what he had learned during his three years in the higher echelons of university administration. That advice led to the founding of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute (CHERI) and the appointment of Ehrenberg as its first director.
"Our goal is to make the institute a center for interdisciplinary research on higher education," said Ehrenberg, who is also the Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics in Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR).
The institute has already earned the confidence of some high-level supporters. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation recently awarded CHERI a grant of $375,000 to examine the economics of higher education. The grant, in turn, attracted matching funds of $300,000 from an anonymous donor. Both the grant and the gift are to be administered over three years.
One of the questions that Ehrenberg hopes the institute will study is why it has become so difficult for universities to hold down costs. "It's partly because of external forces," he said. As an example, he noted that one important criterion U.S. News and World Report uses when it ranks universities is how much they spend per student. That method of measuring excellence is a disincentive for lowering university expenditures on students, he commented.
Ehrenberg also attributes some of the rising costs of higher education to the way universities are organized. Fast decisions often save money, he observed, but most universities have systems of governance that don't allow for immediate action. In addition, universities usually are structured so that various units compete against one another for budget resources, rather then working in unison. Ehrenberg believes it doesn't have to be that way. "A university's resources can be used to reward cooperative behavior," he said.
"The institute offers us a wonderful opportunity to assist the national debate on higher education," said Cornell President Hunter Rawlings. "And having the institute on our campus will benefit our students by exposing them to the ideas that will shape U.S. educational policy."
CHERI's structure is currently lean, with only one part-time administrator in addition to the director, but Ehrenberg projects that it will expand as it begins to have an impact on national education policy. He believes that the institute's location on Cornell's campus will be useful to the institute as it grows. Among the Cornell faculty members doing research on topics relevant to education policy-makers are: Wendy Williams and Steve Ceci in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies, who have conducted studies on the reliability of standardized tests as a predictor of academic success and also looked at the validity of college course evaluations; and Cornell (ILR) Professor Pamela Tolbert, who has done research on the growing trend among universities and colleges toward hiring more and more part-time instructors. "Their areas of study fit well with the kinds of explorations the institute may undertake," Ehrenberg said. He plans a seminar series for the instit! ute as well as annual conferences on those and other hot issues in higher education.
As his first CHERI-sponsored project, Ehrenberg is writing a book on the economics of higher education based on his experience as a university administrator. Slated to be published by Harvard University Press, it is to be an expansion of "Adam Smith Goes to College: An Economist Becomes an Academic Administrator," a paper he wrote that will appear in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in winter 1999.
For more information about the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, contact Professor Ehrenberg, telephone: (607) 255-3026; e-mail: mailto:[email protected].
-30-
RSS