As colleges and universities nationwide anticipate enrolling more than two million new students over the next decade, UC Berkeley is exploring options for serving more students, more cost effectively, in large lecture courses. This research project analyzes economic and pedagogical questions...

This paper explores the proposition that if American higher education has been broadly successful in serving its society, it is in large part because American colleges and universities, and the system of which they are part, were created under conditions of weakness, both academic and financial.

Hiring new colleagues is a matter that engages individual faculty members intensely, for peer control of admission to the professoriate has been a highly successful source of academic quality in American higher education. “Super Stars and Rookies of the Year†analyzes the fixation on...

This paper examines the e-learning strategies adopted by universities, from the perspective of three common objectives: widening access to educational opportunity; enhancing the quality of learning; and reducing the cost of higher education. The discussion is illustrated by drawing on case...

It has been nearly forty years since Clark Kerr was asked to create and lead the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education under the auspices of the Carnegie Corporation. The Commission was to be a national effort, unprecedented both in scope and in the freedom of its director, Kerr, to guide its...

Variable fees at the graduate and undergraduate levels are a topic of discussion in the US and in the EU as part of a larger movement towards increasing the role of fees in the funding of public universities. This essay describes this relatively new shift and its causes, outlines various funding...

What has been the level of public investment in the California higher education system, and how has it performed over the past century? What are the challenges that this system faces in the future and what level of investment is necessary? This paper attempts to provide an historical context to...

Charles Vest gave the first of three Clark Kerr Lectures on the Role of Higher Education in Society on April 19, 2005 on the Berkeley campus. This essay argues that research-intensive public and private universities increasingly have far more similarities than differences in missions,...

This essay examines the ways in which nonprofit universities increasingly emulate businesses, focusing on two of the most direct forms of emulation: the creation of internal university markets at the University of Southern California through adoption of variants of resource center management...

California’s loss of capital gains and stock options revenue during the recent economic downturn was one of the worst in the nation, and the resulting fiscal crisis led to reductions in State appropriations to the University of 15% over the past four years, while enrollments grew by 19%....