*DRAFT: NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION* What is the purpose of higher education?: Comparing student and institutional perspectives for completing a bachelor’s degreeRoy Y. Chan, Gavin T. L. Brown, and Larry H. Ludlow Abstract: Society expects that degree-granting institutions will ensure that college students develop discipline-specific competences (e.g., knowledge, attribute, responsibility) as well as generic skills (e.g., communication, written, oral) and dispositions (e.g., attitudes, beliefs, curiosity) at the completion o f a bachelor’s degree. Current research suggests that undergraduate education is not just about discipline specific knowledge or applied skills; instead, dispositions and generic skills that enable graduates to be effective citizens are also valued outcomes for students completing a college degree in the 21 st century. Utilizing Critical Interpretive Synthesis (CIS), this paper reviews and synthesizes the purposes and aims of undergraduate education from the perspective of (a) higher education institutions and (b) undergraduate students. More specifically, this article aims to address two research questions: (a) What are the differences between students’ and institutional aims, expectations, goals, outcomes, and purposes with regards to generic skills and dispositional outcomes of a college degree and (b) Is there a consensus as to what the goals of a college degree are in terms of core competencies. To answer such questions, a comprehensive search of the literature identified approximately 30 peer-reviewed articles, twelve books, five magazines/ne wspaper articles, and three policy briefs published between 2000 and 2014. Nine domains of the purposes and goals were found and while there was some agreement between institutions and students on the “non -economic” benefits of higher education, especially concerning intellectual cognitive attainment, the review was characterized by a significant misalignme nt. Our findings suggest that student expectations for completing an undergraduate education tend to be very instrumental and personal, while higher education institutional goals and purposes of u ndergraduate educat ion tend towards highly ideal life- and society- changing consequences. This paper calls for significant “Tuning” in higher education to define what a college student should know and be able to do at the completion of higher education. Keywords: purposes and goals of higher education; learning outcomes; generic competences; graduate attributes; transferable skills; dispositions; global skills; value of a college degree; institutional research I. Introduction Over the last half-century, new pressures have challenged the traditional purpose of higher education. 1 On one hand, the purpose of higher education 1 Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), A crucial moment:
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8/11/2019 Researching the Aims, Goals, and Purposes for the Bachelors Degree
tends to reproduce what the larger society is expecting of them. On the other
hand, one would also argue that they should be aiming for more ideal
contributions to the commonwealth society. That conundrum has posed
persistent dilemmas about the goals and aims of higher education.2
Notably, private, nonprofit colleges and universities across the worldface unprecedented challenges on a wide number of issues including support
for student aid, scrutiny over student access and completion, and the value of
a college degree.3 Generally, higher education exist to create, advance,
absorb, and disseminate knowledge through teaching and learning; help
rapid industrialization of the economy; contribute to the development and
improvement of education; and develop higher order cognitive and
communicative skills in young people, such as, the ability to think logically,the capacity to challenge the status quo, and the desire to develop
sophisticated values.4 However, today’s society has also viewed higher
education as a training ground for advanced vocational and professional
skills. This agenda has often created tensions between higher education as a
public good and higher education as a private benefit5, where the growth in
market forces have become increasingly diverse and political within which
they are located.6 This has all resulted in the rise of corporatization and
College learning and democracy’s future, edited by National Task Force on Civic
Learning and Democratic Engagement (Washington, D.C.: Global Perspective
Institute, Inc. (GPI), 2012).2 Joseph L. DeVitis, Contemporary colleges and universities (New York: Peter
Lang Publishing, Inc., 2013).3 Sandy Baum, Jennifer Ma, and Kathleen Payea, Education pays 2013: The benefits
of higher education for individuals and society, (New York: The CollegeBoard,2013), 5-47.4 John Brennan, Niccolo Durazzi, and Tanguy Sene, Things we know and don’t
know `about the Wider Benefits of Higher Education: A review of the recent
literature, (London, UK: London School of Economics and Political Science, 2013).5 Jandhyala B. G. Tilak, “Higher education: A public good or a commodity for
trade?,” Prospects, 38, (2008): 449-466. 6 Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, Higher education? How colleges are
wasting our money and failing our kids and what we can do about it. (New York: St.Martin’s Griffin, 2011).
8/11/2019 Researching the Aims, Goals, and Purposes for the Bachelors Degree
managerialization of higher education processes7, as well as the increasing
political polarization and plutocracy of public policies8, which is often seen
as a contradiction to the traditional academic, scholarly goals of
contemplating important ideas.9
In other words, institutions of higher
education are not only under pressure to develop students’ soft and hardskills but to also enhance their discipline core competencies and dispositions
such as knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs for entry into the global
knowledge-based economy.10
Today’s knowledge economy requires highly skilled personnel at all
levels to deal with rapid technological changes.11
To meet current societal
needs, higher education institutions worldwide are striving to reconstruct
curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment policies to ensure that all studentshave the desired attributes and competencies at the completion of a college
degree.12
Statistically speaking, young college graduates entering in the U.S.
labor force today have substantially declined since the 1990s, and are now at
an all time low since 1972.13
While many jobs posted online requires at least
a bachelor’s degree - approximately 80 and 90 percent14
- limited research
7 Jennifer Washburn, University Inc.: The corporate corruption of American higher
education (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2005). 8 Suzanne Mettler, Degrees of inequality: How the politics of higher education
sabotaged the American dream. (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 1-19.9 Kim Watty “Addressing the basics: academics' view of the purpose of
higher education,” Australian Educational Researcher, 33:1, (2006): 23-39. 10 Martin Haigh and Valerie A. Clifford, “Integral vision: A multi-perspective
approach to the recognition of graduate attributes,” Higher Education Research and
Development, 30:5, (2011): 573-584. 11 Simon Marginson, Markets in education, (Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1997). 12 Robert Wagenaar, “Competences and learning outcomes: A panacea for
understanding the (new) role of higher education?,” Tuning Journal for Higher
Education, 1:2, (2014): 279-302. 13 Anthony P. Carnevale, Andrew R. Hanson, and Arlem Gulish, Failure to launch:
Structural shift and the new lost generation (Washington, D.C.: Center on Education
and the Workforce, Georgetown University, 2013).14
Anthony P. Carnevale, A., Tamara Jayasundera, and Dmitri Repnikov, The onlinecollege labor market: Where the jobs are (Washington, D.C.: Center on Education
8/11/2019 Researching the Aims, Goals, and Purposes for the Bachelors Degree
has explored the primary goals and purposes of undergraduate education and
to what extent college students develop skills-specific and higher-level
learning outcomes, such as, critical thinking, communication, and problem
solving at the completion of higher education.15
This knowledge gap stands in stark contrast to the large number of recentstudies, which have examined the significant “economic benefits” arising
from completing a bachelor’s degree.161718
For instance, Benson, Esteva, and
Levy19
suggest that a bachelor’s degree program from California’s higher
education system still remains a good investment for individuals and society.
Similarly, Delbanco20
stated that a bachelor’s degree is both “good for the
economic health of the nation and that going to college is good for the
economic competitiveness of society”. Comparatively, Hout21
concluded thatindividuals who complete higher education are twice as more likely to earn
more money, live healthier lives, and contribute more to the socio-economic
and well-being of society. In other words, given the well-established
financial and career benefits of a bachelor’s degree,22
it is plausible to
and the Workforce, Georgetown University, 2014), 1-12.
15 Richard P. Keeling, Richard H. Hersh, We’re losing our minds: Rethinking
American higher education (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).16 Jan McArthur, “Reconsidering the social and economic purposes of higher
education,” Higher Education Research & Development, 30:6, (2011): 737-749. 17 Anthony H. Psacharapoulos and George Patrinos, “Returns to investment in
education: A further update,” Education Economics, 12:2, (2004): 111 – 134.18 Christopher Avery and Sarah Turner, “Student loans: Do college students borrow
too much - or not enough,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 26:1, (2012): 165 –
192.19 Alan Benson, Raimundo Esteva, and Frank S. Levy, The economics of B.A.
ambivalence: The case of California higher education (September 13, 2013). doi:
10.2139/ssrn.2325657 20 Andrew Delbanco, College: What it was, is, and should be (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2012), 25.21 Michael Hout, “Social and economic returns to college education in the United
States,” Annual Review of Sociology, 38:1, (2012): 379-400.22
Katie Zaback, Andy Carlson, and Matt Crellin, The economic benefit ofpostsecondary degrees: A state and national level analysis (Boulder, CO: State
8/11/2019 Researching the Aims, Goals, and Purposes for the Bachelors Degree
The ultimate goal of this paper is to answer three sets of research questions:
1) what do current literature suggests to be the goals and purposes of highereducation, 2) how do students and institutions make sense of undergraduate
education in the 21st century, and 3) in what ways does a bachelor’s degree
fulfill higher education ambitions for advanced skills, general competencies,
and high-ideals by the time students graduate from university? In the end,
we offer several recommendations (i.e., notably the “Tuning” initiative) as to
how those differences in aims and goals could be further evaluated in the
hope of resolving potential misalignments surrounding the purpose of highereducation in the 21
st century.
II. Methods
To examine the aims or goals for pursuing higher education, a
comprehensive search of the literature was conducted between September
2012 and June 2014 to identify relevant publications that explored suchthemes. Specifically, this study incorporated Critical Interpretive Synthesis
(CIS) to compare institutional and student perspectives on the goals and
purposes of completing a college degree. CIS, a method derived by Dixon-
Woods et al. 31
, aims to establish theories and concepts from diverse bodies
of existing literatures through systematic review and meta-ethnography
methodologies. Additionally, CIS seeks to question the ways in which the
problems, assumptions, and solutions are constructed in the literature. Inother words, the primary purpose of CIS is to generate theory in discrete
stages of the literature review.
31 Mary Dixon-Woods, Debbie Cavers, Shona Agarwal, Ellen Annandale, Antony
Arthur, and Janet Harvey, “Conducting a critical interpretive synthesis of the
literature on access to healthcare by vulnerable groups,” BMC Medical ResearchMethodology, 6:35, (2006): 6-35.
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education. The bachelor’s degree – often the symbol of success and the
ticket to the middle class – is now viewed as the new high school diploma to
produce highly skilled workers or ‘citizens of the world’ in the 21st century.
For example, the Time/Carnegie Corporation of New York 34
recent survey
reported that 40 percent of undergraduate students believe that the purposeof higher education is to gain new knowledge and skills for a career while 36
percent of college leaders believe that a bachelor’s degree should teach
undergraduates how to think critically. The Association of American
Universities (AAU) 35
identified three goals college students should develop
at the completion of higher education: (1) to be informed by knowledge
about the natural and social worlds, (2) to be empowered through the
mastery of intellectual and practical skills, and (3) to be responsible for theirpersonal actions and for civic values. While the demand for higher education
continues to increase in both the United States and across the world,
institutional leaders and upper-level administrators are beginning to question
the enterprise of modern higher education organizations in the 21st century.
36
For instance, Lagemann and Lewis37
have suggested that the public
purpose for attending higher education has less to do with the pursuit of
economic or employment benefits and much more about preparing young
adults with general skills and civic education such as, civic values, ideals,
and virtues. They argued that undergraduates must “develop generic skills
and dispositions to listen intently and empathetically to other people; …
analyze rationally what is said, read, and observed; … present thoughts
clearly; … confront unsupported assertions; and … identify reasonable
34 Time/Carnegie Corporation of New York, “Higher education poll,”
(New York: Times Magazine, October 18, 2012),35 Association of American Universities (AAU), AAU survey on undergraduate
student objectives and assessment (Washington, DC: Author, 2013).36 Derek C. Bok, Higher education in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2013). 37 Ellen C. Lagemann and Harry Lewis, “Renewing the civic mission of American
higher education,” What is college for? The public purpose of higher education,(New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 2012), 9-45.
8/11/2019 Researching the Aims, Goals, and Purposes for the Bachelors Degree
understanding, (3) skills in problem identification and problem solving, (4) a
sense of purpose, and (5) the confidence to act in ways that make a
difference. Similarly, Nussbaum39
recommended that higher education
should provide students with several general skills and dispositions, such as,
“the ability to think critically; the ability to transcend local loyalties and toapproach world problems as a ‘citizen of the world’; and, finally, the ability
to imagine sympathetically the predicament of another person”. Nonetheless,
many scholars claim that the goals and purposes of higher education are to
develop individuals and the society by inculcating general capabilities and
dispositional outcomes.
Historically, there is ample empirical evidence from Pascarella and
Terenzini to claim that colleges and universities prepare individuals for
longer, fuller, and more productive lives. For instance, Astin et al. 40
summarized five areas on the effects of higher education: (1) learning and
cognitive changes, (2) psychosocial changes, (3) attitudes and values, (4)
moral reasoning, and (5) career and economic impacts. Similarly, Palmer et
al. 41 stressed that undergraduate education “address issues that are central to
38 Zeynep Kiziltepe, “Purposes and identities of higher education institutions, and
relatedly the role of the faculty,” Egitim Arastirmalari - Eurasian Journal of
Educational Research, 40, (2010):114-132. 39 Marth C. Nussbaum, Not for profit: Why democracy needs the humanities
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2012), 7-8.40 Alexander W. Astin, Four critical years (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass
Publishers, 1977). 41 Parker J. Palmer, Arthur Zajonc, Megan Scribner, and Mark Nepo, The heart of
higher education: A call to renewal (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publications,2010), 15-16.
8/11/2019 Researching the Aims, Goals, and Purposes for the Bachelors Degree
purpose (e.g., vocational plans, personal interests, family commitments); and
(7) develop integrity (e.g., humanizing, personalizing values, and
congruence). In other words, the goals and purposes of higher education is to
not only create and disseminate new knowledge for the common good but to
also develop students well being and their own emotional, interpersonal,
ethical, and intellectual development.44
To enumerate, Pascarella and Terenzini45
concluded that roughly two-
thirds consider it “essential” or “very important” that their college enhance
their cognitive, social, and affective development (i.e., critical thinking skills
d=.50, self-understanding d=.69, responsible citizenship d=.67, personal
values d=.67, emotional development d=.63, reflective judgment thinking
d=.90, and epistemological sophistication or maturity d=2.00). While the
42 Michael Polanyi, Personal knowledge: Towards a post-critical philosophy
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974).43 Athur W. Chickering and Linda Reisser, Education and identity (San Francisco,
CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1993).44 Nicholas Maxwell, “From knowledge to wisdom ,” London Review of Education,
5, (2007): 97-115. 45
Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick T. Terenzini, How college affects students: Threedecades of research (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2005), .
8/11/2019 Researching the Aims, Goals, and Purposes for the Bachelors Degree
limited college learning reported by Arum and Roksa is quite likely an
underestimation of students’ true college learning, their study warns that
higher education institutions may not be the place for developing students’
generic competencies in favor of meaning, purpose, authenticity, and
spirituality. Typically, ‘generic skills’ are described as the set of skills thatcan be broadly applied across different contexts beyond disciplinary content
knowledge.46
A good example is the “Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP)”
by the Lumina Foundation which attempts to define what a college student
should learn, understand, and know at the completion of a U.S. bachelor’s
degree. The DQP identifies five general domains of knowledge and general
skills that higher education institutions should focus within undergraduate
(4) health, (5) well-being, and (6) the effects of the student experience. In a
46 Richie Moalosi, M. Tunde Oladiran, and Jacek Uziak, “Students’ perspective on
the attainment of graduate attributes through a design Project,” Global Journal of
Engineering Education, 14:1, (2012): 40-46. 47 Lumina Foundation USA, The degree qualifications profile (Indianapolis, IN:
Lumina Foundation for Education, Inc., 2011). 48 Debra Bath, Calvin Smith, Sarah Stein, and Richard Swann, “Beyond mapping
and embedding graduate attributes: bringing together quality assurance and action
learning to create a validated and living curriculum,” Higher Education Research
and Development, 23:3, (2004): 313-328.49 John Brennan, Niccolo Durazzi, and Tanguy Sene, Things we know and don’t
know about the Wider Benefits of Higher Education: A review of the recentliterature. (London, UK: London School of Economics and Political Science, 2013).
8/11/2019 Researching the Aims, Goals, and Purposes for the Bachelors Degree
III.1.1.1. Student’s purposes and goals of completing a college degree
Today’s traditional-age college students enter higher education under the
weight of tremendous social and economic pressures. Nowadays,
undergraduates have often seen higher education as a place to developeconomic and social benefits, such as, enhanced careers and greater earning
potential, as well as knowledge and expertise in a disciplinary or
professional area. For instance, the Lumina Foundation and the Gallop Poll62
concluded that 95 percent of Americans expected the purpose of higher
education is to “get a good job.” Similarly, Astin et al. 63
claimed that first-
year students expect their institutions to play an instrumental role in
preparing them for employment (94%) and graduate or advanced education(81%). Though this ambition has been increasingly focused on jobs and
money, this altruistic and possibly romantic view of student motivation is
not the complete picture. Notably, many scholars have often reported that
undergraduate students expect universities to give them the necessary tools
they need to find a job, to better understand themselves as people, and to
gain multiple opportunities to make the world a better place in our society.64
Historically, the Yale Report of 182865
emphasized that the predominant
reasons a student should attend higher education is to develop “the discipline
and furniture of the mind”. Today, however, there is substantial evidence to
claim that student expectations or goals have changed, and that
undergraduate students are being more motivated by personal or social
development concerns as well as by instrumental, materialistic ambitions.
62 Lumina Foundation and Gallup, “What America needs to know about
higher education redesign,” (Washington, D.C.: Lumina Foundation, 2014). 63 Alexander W. Astin, Helen S. Astin, and Jennifer A. Lindholm, Cultivating the
spirit: How college can enhance students’ inner lives (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-
Bass, 2011).64 Donna Henderson-King and Michelle N. Smith, “Meanings of education for
university students: academic motivation and personal values as predictors,” Social
Psychology of Education, 9, (2006): 195-221.65 Yale Report, Yale Report of 1828 (New Haven, CT: Yale College, 1828), 7.
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decision to pursue a bachelor’s degree is to have the “college experience”
(i.e., meeting students, being inspired by new ideas and/or leading academics,
opportunity to socialize or to lead an organization, and make friends).
Similarly, Levine and Dean67 claimed that students purpose for attendinghigher education are: (a) to make them feel secure, (b) to be autonomous
grown-ups, (c) to seek intimacy, and (d) to live in an Internet world.
Likewise, Bui68
highlighted 11 reasons undergraduate students pursue a
bachelor’s degree: (1) their friends were going to college, (2) their parents
expected them to go to college, (3) their high school teachers/counselor
persuaded them to go, (4) they wanted a college degree to achieve their
career goals, (5) they wanted a better income with a college degree, (6) theyliked to learn, (7) they wanted to provide a better life for their own children,
(8) they wanted to gain their independence, (9) they wanted to acquire skills
to function effectively in society, (10) they wanted to get out of their parents'
neighborhood, and (11) they did not want to work immediately after high
school. Nevertheless, some college students view higher education as a place
to acquire a job and to be well off financially, while others view it as an
opportunity to obtain new knowledge and expertise in a disciplinary or
professional area.
To enumerate, the UCLA CIRP annual “Freshman Survey” has
significantly shown that money is the primary motivation incoming students
pursue a bachelor’s degree in the 21st century. To illustrate, between 1967
and 2013, there was a 40 percent increase in undergraduates expecting
66 Michael Barber, Katelyn Donnelly, and Saad Rizvi, An avalanche is coming:
Higher education and the revolution ahead (London, UK: Institute for Public Policy
Research, 2013): 1-16. 67 Athur Levine and Diane R. Dean, Generation on a tightrope: A portrait of
today’s college student (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publications, 2012).68 Khanh Van T. Bui, “First-generation college students at a four-year university:
background characteristics, reasons for pursuing higher education, and first-yearexperiences,” College Student Journal, 36:1, (2002): 3-11.
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However, the desire to pursue several goals and purposes
may create conflict with one another where institutions become less
intellectually driven and culturally oriented and instead model themselves on
businesses and commercial ventures, which perhaps may be detrimental to
the original aims and purposes of higher education. For instance, the demandfor students to receive practical training at research universities may in fact
marginalize the humanities and undermine liberal education. As a result,
pursuing multiple goals and purposes would become necessary university
leaders. However, the relative misalignment between institutions and
students of completing a college degree may ultimately suggest that higher
education institutions have a significant challenge in front of them.
For example, the UNESCO’s International Institute for EducationalPlanning
75 volume in The Diversification of Post-secondary Education
concludes that students from non-university technical programs in South
Korea, Malaysia, and India are more likely to acquire employment than
students from traditional university degree programs. Indeed, if modern
universities in the United States are serious about encouraging students to
embrace the lofty ambitions of undergraduate studies, then they will need to
take seriously the differences in student goals. While not discounting the
importance of the economic and “non-economic” benefits arising from a
bachelor’s degree, much career and vocational training does not require or
take place in traditional higher education. Rather, it takes place in
polytechnic or for-profit institutions (i.e., University of Phoenix, Kaplan
University), gap-year programs, as well as on-the-job apprenticeship
industry training or non-traditional higher education programs (i.e.,
UnCollege, Minerva Schools at KGI).76 As long as students and families
74 Debra Humphreys and Patrick Kelly, How the liberal arts and sciences majors
fair in employment: A report on earnings and long-term career paths (Washington,
D.C.: AACU and NCHEMS, 2014).75 UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning, The diversification
of post-secondary education (Paris, France: International Institute for Educational
Planning (IIEP), 2014).76 Joseph O’Shea, Gap year: How delaying college changes people in ways the
8/11/2019 Researching the Aims, Goals, and Purposes for the Bachelors Degree
home discipline core, and 5) implement locally. From the five base models,
faculty members can work with colleagues and their students to identify a
roadmap of competences and learning outcomes to define precisely what thedegree tries to connect and develop in a “learning society.” Such a strategy
would help undergraduate students to recognize the purposes and goals of
higher education, and to address any potential misalignment between
institutions and students as well as employers and college graduates on the
structures, programs, and actual teaching of an institutional degree program.
Aside from “Tuning” methodology, a further recommendation we
suggest is for higher education institutions to assess the student body fortheir learning outcomes as part of institutional self-review — similar to the
processes of institutional review carried out at James Madison University.85
Specifically, higher education providers could obtain institutional
evaluations of the attributes noted by employers or graduate schools when
students are selected for employment or entry to a position. Furthermore,
higher education institutions could integrate the European Qualifications
Framework for Lifelong Learning (EQF) to help make qualifications more
reasable and understandable across different countries.86
Such analyses
might reveal that graduate attributes are not being achieved over the students’
four critical years in college and thus, higher education institutions would be
forced to revise their curricular offerings in order to make their goals and
purposes more explicit and attainable. In addition to institutions,
undergraduate students could also undergo a comprehensive self-assessment
85 Anna Zilberberg, Allison R. Brown, J. Christine Harmes, and Robin D. Anderson,
“How can we increase student motivation during low-stakes testing? Understanding
the student perspective,” In Daniel M. McInerney, Gavin T. L. Brown, and Gregory
Arief D. Liem (Eds.), Student perspectives on assessment: What students can tell us
about assessment for learning (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2009),
255-278.86 Bastiaan L. Aardema and Cristina Churruca Muguruza, “The humanititarian
action qualifications framework: A quality assurance tool for the HumanitarianSector,” Tuning Journal for Higher Education, 1:2, (2014): 429-462.
8/11/2019 Researching the Aims, Goals, and Purposes for the Bachelors Degree
Department of Educational Research, Measurement and Evaluation at the
Lynch School of Education of Boston College. He is a past recipient of the
“2013 American Educational Research Association (AERA) Fellow” in
recognition of his exceptional scientific or scholarly contributions to
education research. His research interests include teacher testing, facultyevaluations, applied psychometrics, and the history of statistics. He holds a
PhD in Measurement, Evaluation and Statistical Analysis from the