Diverse Issues in Higher Education: Top 100 Undergraduate Degree Producers (2008)
(Added July, 2008) This year’s report includes degrees conferred during the 2005-2006 academic year that have so far been reported to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) through the Completions Survey of the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Set (IPEDS). The preliminary data are complete and accurate for those institutions included in the analysis, which, in our experience, represents the vast majority of the country’s two- and four-year institutions. We welcome back this year the institutions in the Mississippi and Louisiana Gulf Coast region that were granted a reprieve from reporting last year due to the clean-up and rebuilding effort after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. As one small reminder of the disaster, many of those institutions do not have prior year data and, and so are missing the indicator of percent change from the prior year.

Eliminating Racial Disparities in College Completion and Achievement: Current Initiatives, New Ideas, and Assessment (2006, pdf file)
(Added June, 2008) Colleges and universities have responded to racial and ethnic disparities on campus by implementing a host of financial aid, mentoring, tutoring, and social support programs over the past five decades. Curiously, there has been little effort to catalog or assess these programs.To help fill this void, Cornell University, Colgate University, Hamilton College, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Wells College received funding from the Teagle Foundation to study programs designed to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in college completion and achievement. The goal of our project is to produce a report that will help administrators assess their current diversity programs, and select alternatives.

REPORT - Graduation Rate Watch Making Minority Student Success a Priority (pdf file)
Graduation Rate Watch uses newly available federal data to identify universities with small or nonexistent gaps between the graduation rates of white students and black students and discusses how these institutions have achieved such success. The report lists 94 colleges and universities that have achieved graduation rate parity. It also highlights Historically Black Colleges and Universities that have improved graduation rates for black students. Graduation Rate Watch also contains a comprehensive list of universities with unusually large graduation gaps, institutions with disparities that are often 20 percentage points or more. Detailed reccomendations are provided for policymakers to provide better incentives for institutions to close these gaps and give minority students the resources they need to earn a college degree. (added April, 2008)

Envisioning the Next Generation of Diversity Work: Core Agreements and Correspondences (podcast)
Caryn McTighe Musil of AAC&U and Laura I. Rendon of Iowa State University consider new directions in diversity work. The speakers examine the dominant institutional values that have trapped the academy in patterns of exclusion; practices that reward only certain kinds of thinking, scholarship, and teaching; and approaches that are needed to advance diversity and inclusion as educational assets. Click here for mp3 version and a complete listing of sessions from the AAC&U 2006 Diversity and Learning Conference).

Making a Real Difference with Diversity: A Guide to Institutional Change
Making a Real Difference with Diversity provides readers with a step-by-step guide for implementing, evaluating, and sustaining comprehensive diversity work on campus. Drawn from a six-year diversity initiative involving twenty-eight independent California colleges and universities, the monograph offers a set of promising practices and selected quantitative and qualitative findings pertaining to efforts to enhance college access and success for underrepresented students, increase the presence of underrepresented minority faculty, and strengthen overall institutional functioning regarding diversity.

Characteristics of Minority-Serving Institutions and Minority Undergraduates Enrolled in These Institutions
The National Center for Education Statistics reports growth in minority enrollment and an increase in minority-serving institutions over the past 20 years.  The report, available in pdf, examines various subgroups of institutions that strive to incorporate underserved students, while recognizing the challenges they face.

Opening the Door to the American Dream: Increasing Higher Education Access and Success for Immigrants (pdf)
This study, released in April 2007 by the Institute for Higher Education Policy, examines multiple barriers that prevent immigrants from entering college and/or completing bachelors degrees education. Immigrant enrollment rates in college are lower than their native-born peers and are more likely to drop out of college. The study also provides recommendations, whereby federal, state, and local policymakers and higher education institutions can increase the access and success of immigrants by increasing support for programs that address barriers, creating a more transparent financial aid and college application process and creating state, local, and institutional policies that target the differing needs of various immigrant populations.

Promise Abandoned:  How Policy Choices and Institutional Practices Restrict College Opportunities  
A new report released from the Education Trust sharply criticizes trends in federal, state, and college practices that discourage low-income and minority students from enrolling in and graduating from college.  In fact, despite the perception of progress, gaps in college-attendance and completion for poor and minority students are actually wider than they were thirty years ago.

The School of Spellings: An Interview with Margaret Spellings  
U.S. Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings has shifted her focus from K-12 to colleges and universities. The Commission on the Future of Higher Education was formed to launch a national dialogue to strengthen higher education and Spellings is pushing for a major overhaul of financing, assessment, accessibility and perhaps even coursework in higher education. The final report (pdf) argued that colleges and universities were not prepared for the challenges of an increasingly diverse population. In an interview with Diverse, Spellings talks about bringing her “business-style accountability” to colleges and universities.

Engines of Inequality: Diminishing Equity in the Nation’s Premier Public Universities  (pdf)
According to a newly released report by Education Trust, the country’s fifty public flagship universities now serve disproportionately fewer low-income and minority students than in the past. The report shows that the African American, Latino/a and Native American groups combined account for only 12 percent of undergraduate students at flagship universities. Despite receiving more endowments and funding from states, the flagship universities provided more financial aid to high-income students than low-income students, as the high-income students help to increase their rankings. This caused more obstacles to college enrollment and success among low-income students.

Paying Double: Inadequate High Schools and Community College
Remediation  (pdf)  
The Alliance for Excellent Education, a high-school focused think tank, released a report estimating the cost of remediation for community colleges in all 50 states.  The report indicates that two-year institutions spend $1.4 billion annually to help students receive the skills they need in order to graduate or join the work force — skills they ideally should have earned in high school.

Pipeline to Pathways: New Directions for Improving the Status of Women on Campus
By Judith S. White, from Liberal Education, Winter 2005
Much of the effort to improve the status of women in higher education has focused on the so-called "pipeline" theory, which held that a large number of women undergraduates and graduate students would, over time, yield larger numbers of women at the highest academic ranks. However, research on the status of women at research universities confirms that the numbers for women full professors have not increased in the past five years. Together with the willingness of institutional leaders to grasp the structural problems involved in women’s “failure” to rise in faculty ranks, these have created an important opportunity to rethink the societal context of academic careers.

Increasing Diversity on College Campuses: What Are We Learning? Irvine Quarterly
At 28 independent colleges and universities across California, administrators and faculties have been participating in the Irvine Foundation's Campus Diversity Initiative (CDI), a five-year, $29 million effort designed to improve college access and retention rates of underrepresented students and to identify ways to better serve the needs of a rapidly changing student body. The CDI was designed with the recognition that many campuses were already supporting a wide range of diversity-related projects-but that these efforts often did not achieve their full potential because the programs lacked integration with broader institutional goals and planning.

The Campus Diversity Initiative: Its Current Status, Anticipating the Future (pdf), Daryl Smith at Claremont Graduate University

An interim evaluation report, The Campus Diversity Initiative: Its Current Status, Anticipating the Future, provides an overview of the James Irvine Campus Diversity Initiative's (CDI) work to date, foreshadows the work to be done in the remaining years, and a glimpse of what is being learned.

Serving the Nation: Opportunities and Challenges in the Use of Information Technology at Minority-Serving Colleges and Universities, Alliance for Equity in Higher Education

A new, groundbreaking report describes how Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, and Tribal Colleges and Universities are in an unrivaled position to remedy the technological disenfranchisement of the nation's emerging majority populations-the nation's future workforce-but remain limited due to lack of financial resources.

Report on the Status of Women, Georgia Institute of Technology

This report is an extensive institutional self-evaluation of the status of female students and faculty on campus. It documents the results of a five-year (1993-1998) examination of student and faculty demographics, the educational and professional experiences of female students and faculty, and the campus climate at Georgia Tech. The broad objective of this investigation was to identify the fundamental issues that differentially affect the education and employment of female students and faculty at Georgia Tech.

Building Community Through Diversity, University of Colorado at Boulder

In fall 1994, Student Affairs Research Services (SARS) surveyed CU-Boulder undergraduates about the campus climate for students of color. Comments and ratings collected from 329 undergraduate students of color and from 101 white students, along with information from official University student records, painted a conflicting picture of the situation for undergraduate students of color at the university. Based on these findings and record results, plus conversations with student, staff, and faculty reviewers, the researchers suggest ten themes and issues for administrators who are seeking to improve campus climate. In addition, these data were used to inform recommendations made by the CU-Boulder chancellor and vice-chancellors.

The Internationalization of US Higher Education (pdf)

This report presents an overview of international education at US colleges and universities. It reviews published and unpublished accounts of curricular and co- curricular undergraduate internationalization. The data suggests that in spite of the growing interest in international education, few undergraduates gain international or intercultural competence while in college.