Ronald G. Ehrenberg

• Cornell University

Using restricted-access Survey of Earned Doctorates data, we investigate which attributes of a doctoral institution predict the share of its undergraduate BAs that will earn a PhD. We use truncation-correction to account for PhD receipt post-sample. Across the fields of humanities, physical, natural, and social sciences, PhD production is positivel...

Modern Labor Economics: Theory and Public Policy, now in its thirteenth edition, continues to be the leading text for one-semester courses in labor economics at the undergraduate and graduate levels. It offers a thorough overview of the modern theory of labor market behavior, and reveals how this theory is used to analyze public policy. Designed fo...

This personal reflective chapter summarizes and explains why the frequency with which I have coauthored research has varied over my career and discusses the reasons that my coauthored publications and collaborations have arisen. The reasons include research that arises from casual conversations with colleagues; the sharing of data both as a donor a...

This personal reflective essay summarizes and explains why the frequency with which I have coauthored research has varied over my career and discusses the reasons that my coauthored publications and collaborations have arisen. The reasons include research that arises from casual conversations with colleagues, the sharing of data both as a donor and...

The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program (MMUF) encourages underrepresented minority (URM) students to pursue PhD study with an eye towards entering academia. Fellows have completed PhDs at high rates relative to other students, but they are selected for their interest and potential. In this paper we use restricted access data from the Mell...

Gary Fethke and Andrew Policano's book Public No More: A New Path to Excellence for America's Public Universities paints a picture of a future for public research universities that is very different than what many people will want to see. Their message is that the financial and governance models under which public universities have operated have br...

Teachers in all fields should be interested in the technique used in reviewing these 13 textbooks in labor economics. Research in compiling and classifying textbook characteristics in other areas could greatly simplify and possibly expand the options of teachers in the selection of appropriate books for their courses.

American higher education is in transition along many dimensions: tuition levels, faculty composition, expenditure allocation, pedagogy, technology, and more. During the last three decades, at private four-year academic institutions, undergraduate tuition levels increased each year on average by 3.5 percent more than the rate of inflation; the comp...

We evaluate potential determinants of enrollment in an early retirement incentive program for non-tenure-track employees at a large university. Using administrative records on the eligible population of employees not covered by collective bargaining agreements, historical employee count and layoff data by budget units, and public information on uni...

The United States lacks timely reliable mechanisms for assessing the professional work of subspecialty physicians. The aim was to use early-career members of The Endocrine Society as a model to estimate subspecialty physician involvement in patient care, teaching, research, and administration among clinical, academic, federal, and pharmaceutical/bi...

This paper provides an introduction to the economics of tuition and fees in American Higher Education. It summarizes data on undergraduate tuition and fee levels in public and private institutions, discusses the forms of financial assistance that students receive, and provides explanations for why tuition and fees for undergraduate students in both...

To improve our understanding of the factors that influence persistence rates in STEM field majors, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation provided a grant to the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute in 2007 to study the question. The five papers in the symposium represent the output of the project. This introduction explains the motivation for under...

To assess the workforce and workplace in rheumatology, and the research work of early-career rheumatologists. Early-career rheumatologists were defined as practicing physicians who joined the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) in 1991-2005, were 49 years of age or younger when they joined, and reside in North America. This cohort participated i...

This study uses panel data to examine the relationship between faculty employment and external R&D expenditures at Research and Doctoral institutions over a 15-year period of time. On average, a 1% increase in the number of full-time faculty is associated with about 0.2% increase in total R&D expenditure. Further, a one percentage point increase in...

Our paper focuses on the role that the gender composition of the leaders of American colleges and universities -trustees, presidents/chancellors, and provosts/academic vice presidents - plays in influencing the rate at which academic institutions diversify their faculty across gender lines. Our analyses make use of institutional level panel data th...

[Excerpt] Never abundant, financial support for the “academic humanities” is now scarce. How scarce it is, both in absolute and relative terms, and whether the humanities now confront particularly hard times, are the pressing questions. To piece together an answer, we ask first how much the government, foundations, and private donors provide for th...

Despite the worldwide prestige of America's doctoral programs in the humanities, all is not well in this area of higher education and hasn't been for some time. The content of graduate programs has undergone major changes, while high rates of student attrition, long times to degree, and financial burdens prevail. In response, the Andrew W. Mellon F...

This study examines institution-specific factors that are within the control of the advancement office and that predict fundraising efficiency and total dollars raised. Using data from the Council of Independent Colleges and IPEDS, fundraising outcomes are examined at private colleges in the United States. Most of the variables of interest are not...

Our paper focuses on the role that the gender composition of the leaders of American colleges and universities--trustees, presidents/chancellors, and provosts/academic vice presidents--plays in influencing the rate at which academic institutions diversify their faculty across gender lines. Our analyses make use of institutional level panel data tha...

During the last two decades, median instructional spending per full-time equivalent (FTE) student at American 4-year colleges and universities has grown at a slower rate than median spending per FTE student in a number of other expenditure categories including academic support, student services and research. Our paper uses institutional level panel...

[Excerpt] Endowments are stocks of financial and real assets that are held by universities to generate income for both current and future operations. “True Endowments” are assets that at the time they were initially given to the university were specified by the donor to be held by the university in perpetuity. Hence over time only the cumulative su...

A review of the literature on the empirical effects of advance notification of plant closings (voluntary and mandated), including the authors' recent study using data drawn from the 1984 Survey of Displaced Workers. suggests that advance notice reduces the probalility that displaced workers suffer any spells of unemployment and may also moderated t...

Doctoral programs in the humanities and related social sciences are characterized by high attrition and long times to degree. In 1991 the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation launched the Graduate Education Initiative (GEI) to improve the quality of graduate programs and in turn reduce attrition and shorten time-to-degree. Over a 10-year period, the Foundat...

[Excerpt] In 1991 the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation launched the Graduate Education Initiative (GEI) to improve the structure and organization of PhD programs in the humanities and social sciences and to combat the high rates of student attrition and long time to degree completion prevailing in these fields. While attrition and time to completion wer...

[Excerpt] The members of Generation X are the young faculty members of today and the immediate future. The panelists at this session of the conference were asked to discuss the effects of this generation on academic norms and institutional governance and the types of new models that may be emerging for academia as a result of them. More specificall...

American colleges and universities simultaneously face large numbers of faculty retirements and expanding enrollments. Budget constraints have led colleges and universities to substitute part-time and full-time non-tenure-track faculty for tenure-track faculty, and the demand for faculty members will likely be high in the decade ahead. This heighte...

In this article we focus on a homogeneous set of thirty-one highly selective private colleges and universities. The academic aptitudes and preparations of students attending these institutions are among the highest in the nation, and historically students from these institutions have been much more likely to go on to PhD study than the average coll...

[Excerpt] This paper presents empirical estimates of the intra-industry cross-section relationship between annual overtime hours per man and the ratio of these quasi-fixed costs to the overtime wage rate. Estimates are also made of the impact of a change in the overtime premium on employment and hours; these estimates have implications for policyma...

We study the adoption of Common Application membership by private four-year postsecondary institutions and its role in explaining the growth in undergraduate applications. Using data from the College Board's Annual Survey of Colleges, our estimation of proportional hazard models suggest that institutions respond to the net benefit of adoption. We e...

This article discusses how federal and state governments can improve student access to private and public higher education institutions. Florida helps to achieve that with a common course-numbering system across community and four-year colleges, which permits students to easily transfer credits. Both the Senate and the House of Delegates in Virgini...

[Excerpt] In this paper, we go inside the “black box” of graduate education to investigate what characteristics of graduate programs in the humanities and related social sciences actually influence PhD students’ attrition and graduation probabilities. We make use of data from the Graduate Education Survey; a retrospective survey of all graduate stu...

AS ROBERT Haveman and Kathryn Wilson point out in chapter 2, differences in college enrollment rates across students from families of different socioeconomic levels have only marginally narrowed since the early 1970s (Baum and Payea 2004, figure 21). Moreover, students from lower-income families are much more likely to start higher education in two...

'This is a compelling and important text that presents both the complexity and the barriers confronting higher education in this global moment. Solutions will prize innovation, resilient leadership unifying diverse campus subcultures, and most certainly intellectual and academic integrity. This text begins to outline the new agenda.' - Richard Guar...

[Excerpt] A variety of factors are responsible for the rapidly escalating costs of undergraduate education in the United States. Concern about quality — of students, faculty, course offerings, physical plant, and image — militates against a focus on efficiency and productivity at the selective private colleges and universities; a perception among s...

Science and the University investigates the tremendous changes that have taken place in university research over the past several decades, gauging the current state of research in higher education and examining issues and challenges crucial to its future. Scientific research increasingly dominates the aims and agendas of many American universities,...

Doctoral programs in the humanities and related social sciences are characterized by high attrition and long times-to-degree. In response to these problems, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation launched the Graduate Education Initiative (GEI) to improve the quality of graduate programs and in turn reduce attrition and shorten times-to-degree. Over a 10-...

Using new data on intercollegiate athletes, this article shows that recent improvement in Title IX compliance among NCAA Division I institutions was previously overestimated, and provides the first estimates of compliance in Divisions II and III. In addition, regression analyses investigate how institutional characteristics relate to the extent of...

Average faculty salaries differ widely across fields at American colleges and universities and the magnitudes of these field differences in salaries have been growing over time. What is less well known, however, is that at any point in time there are wide differences in the magnitudes of field differences in faculty salaries across academic institu...

In this paper the author discusses the various factors which have contributed to a substantial decrease in state funding for public colleges and universities, including increased strain on state tax revenues, rising tuition costs, the discrepancy between public and private institutions in endowment revenues, faculty salaries, and expenditures per s...

[Excerpt] Public colleges and universities are in danger of losing their place as engines of social mobility and generators of knowledge. State appropriations to public colleges and universities, as a share of their overall budgets, have been shrinking since the 1980s even as enrollments have climbed. The resulting financial pressures have led to t...

[Excerpt] The nature of faculty employment practices at American colleges and universities is changing rapidly. So too is the gender, racial and ethnic composition of American faculty members. These changes, along with the growing importance and costs of scientific research, the increased commercialization of faculty research, the elimination of ma...

In this review, the author posits that Richard Vedder’s book Going Broke By Degree: Why College Costs Too Much, while providing a good diagnosis of the problems and issues facing public higher education, suffers from a heavily political bent which skews Vedder’s policy conclusions away from empirical evidence and toward ideology. The author’s essay...

During the last two decades, there has been a significant growth in the share of faculty members at American colleges and universities that are employed in part-time or full-time nontenure-track positions. Our study is the first to address whether the increased usage of such faculty adversely affects undergraduate students' graduation rates. Using...

[Excerpt] It is well-known that test scores are correlated with students’ socio-economic backgrounds. Hence to the extent that colleges are successful in “buying” higher test score students, one should expect that their enrollment of students from families in the lower tails of the family income distribution should decline. However, somewhat surpri...

This paper provides an overview of research that I have conducted during my career using data sets collected by offices of institutional research. Many of the examples discussed in the paper deal with graduate education. The paper illustrates how valuable the data collection efforts by these offices are to academic researchers interested in helping...

[Excerpt] Recent evidence suggests that the growing use of part-time and full-time non-tenure-track faculty nationwide adversely influences American college students’ graduation rates (Ehrenberg and Liang Zhang, 2005). I have become concerned that the increased usage of non-tenure track faculty members also likely adversely influences the propensit...

The Journal of Higher Education 76.1 (2005) 110-111 Approximately once each decade a book is published that can best be thought of as a handbook of educational fund raising. New Strategies for Educational Fund Raising is a worthy successor to earlier volumes. The editor has worked hard to eliminate redundant material in its 31 chapters, which conta...

[Excerpt] U.S. News & World Report (USNWR) shook up the college guide industry when it began publishing its annual rankings of colleges in 1983. The summary of its annual rankings of colleges as undergraduate institutions that appear in a fall issue each year is by far the best selling issue of USNWR each year and, together with its more comprehens...

This paper, presented at the ORAU/CGS Conference on Graduate Education and American Competitiveness in Washington, discusses the causes and for the drop in American PhD students across the country, and lists the implications for that trend for American competitiveness. The author argues that the mobility of graduate students, and PhD students in pa...