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Background: Choice is a key part of the culture of the United States. Americans believe deeply in the personal and social usefulness of being able to make many choices. Hence, all sorts of efforts have been made to increase students' options, whether by creating many different kinds of schools and colleges, offering a great array of majors and degree programs, or allowing multiple modes of attending higher education. However, this proliferation of choices reproduces social inequality in two crucial ways. First, the provision of many options produces social inequality: people often make choices that do not serve their interests as well as they might wish, particularly if they are faced with many options and do not have adequate information. Second, the provision of many choices legitimates social inequality: the more one thinks in terms of choices in the context of a highly individualistic culture such as that of the United States, the easier it is for dominant groups to blame nondominants as creating their own troubles through feckless choices. Purpose: This paper focuses on one particularly important realm of choice—higher education—because it has come to play a central role in the transmission and legitimation of social inequality. Four higher education choices are of particular interest: whether to enter higher education, which college to attend, what major to choose, and what modality to attend college (for example, part time versus full time or in person versus online). Analyzing this choice-making process, the paper focuses on the impact of inequitable access to high-quality information. Beyond analyzing how choice proliferation and information inequity join to produce and legitimate educational inequality, the paper lays out detailed recommendations for what can be done to reduce this inegalitarian impact. Research Design: The paper draws on a wide variety of social science literatures including sociology of education, critical race theory, behavioral economics, and cognitive and social psychology. More particularly, the paper synthesizes sociology of education research inspired by Pierre Bourdieu and work drawing on critical race theory. Although there are major tensions between these two bodies of work, they can be fruitfully combined to both illuminate and overcome the ways information inequity produces and legitimates educational inequality. Recommendations: To reduce the role of information inequity in producing and legitimating educational inequality, the paper recommends four strands of change. One strand involves providing high-quality information more equitably through restructured and much more pervasive school counseling and other forms of information provision during middle school, high school, and higher education. A crucial component of this more equitable information provision is drawing on the community cultural wealth of nondominant communities. Second, it is important to design an "architecture of choice" that simplifies choice making and nudges students toward better choices by such means as simplifying the financial aid process, improving credit articulation for community college transfer students, and building guided pathways through college. A third strand involves reducing the harms of suboptimal choices by creating the means to monitor student progress and intervene when students might or actually do go off course. Finally, because suboptimal choices will still occur, it is important to enlighten student choosers and their observers about how choice making under conditions of information inequity produces and legitimates social inequality and to empower them to combat that stratified and stratifying process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

England and the United States provide a very interesting pairing as countries with many similarities, but also instructive dissimilarities, with respect to their policies for higher education access and success. We focus on five key policy strands: student information provision; outreach from higher education institutions; student financial aid; affirmative action or contextualisation in higher education admissions; and programmes to improve higher education retention and completion. At the end, we draw conclusions on what England and the US can learn from each other. The US would benefit from following England in using Access and Participation Plans to govern university outreach efforts, making more use of income-contingent loans, and expanding the range of information provided to prospective higher education students. Meanwhile, England would benefit from following the US in making greater use of grant aid to students, devoting more policy attention to educational decisions students are making in early secondary school, and expanding its use of contextualised admissions. While we focus on England and the US, we think that the policy recommendations we make carry wider applicability. Many other countries with somewhat similar educational structures, experiences, and challenges could learn useful lessons from the policy experiences of these two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberal theories—whether the new public management, principal-agent theory, or performance management—have provided the rationale for sweeping reforms in the governance and operation of higher education. This paper expands our understanding of neoliberal theory and practice by examining a leading neoliberal reform: performance-based funding (PBF) for higher education in the USA, Europe, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. Our analysis of PBF examines not only its impacts but also its origins and implementation. Neoliberal theory has been used not only prospectively to design and argue for certain public policies but also retrospectively to analyse the origins and implementation of neoliberal policy. Hence, this paper examines this retrospective neoliberal analysis in order to determine how well neoliberal theory helps us understand the origins and implementation of neoliberal policy: in this case, the socio-political forces that gave rise to PBF; and the political and organizational features of the processes by which PBF was implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background/Context: Performance funding finances public higher education institutions based on outcomes such as retention, course and degree completion, and job placement rather than inputs such as enrollments. One of the mysteries of state performance funding for higher education is that despite great interest in it for over 30 years, only half of all states have ever adopted it. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This study examines the political forces that have driven the development of performance funding in some states but not others. To do this, the authors draw on theories of policy origins such as the advocacy coalition framework, the policy entrepreneurship perspective, and policy diffusion theory. Research Design: This study contrasts the experiences of six states that established performance funding for higher education (Florida, Illinois, Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Washington) and two that have not (California and Nevada). These states differ considerably in their performance funding programs, higher education governance arrangements, and political and socioeconomic characteristics. Data Collection and Analysis: Our study is qualitative, drawing on documentary records and extensive interviews with higher education officials, legislators and staff, governors and advisors, business leaders, and other actors. Findings and Results: Our study finds that many of the actors and motives cited by the prevailing perspective on the origins of performance funding did operate in the six states that have established performance funding, including state legislators (particularly Republicans), governors, and business people pursuing performance funding in the name of greater effectiveness and efficiency for higher education. However, the prevailing perspective misses the major role of state higher education coordinating boards and individual higher education institutions (particularly community colleges) that pursued performance funding to secure new funds in an era of greater tax resistance and criticism of higher education, our findings further move beyond the prevailing explanation by examining how policy entrepreneurs mobilized support for performance funding by finding ideological common ground among different groups, identifying policies that those groups could support, and taking advantage of political openings to put performance funding onto the decision agenda of state elected officials. Conclusions and Recommendations: This examination of the origins of performance funding policies sheds light on factors that facilitate and frustrate the development of such policies. For example, our research highlights the important role of higher education opposition and the presence of certain political structures and political values in frustrating the development of performance funding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background/Context: Performance funding in higher education ties government funding to institutional performance on indicators such as retention, graduation, and job placement. Performance funding can also be found in state K-12 funding policies and higher education quality assurance programs abroad. One of the puzzles about higher education performance funding is that half of the states establishing it later abandoned it. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This study examines the factors that have led many states to drop performance funding for higher education. Research Design: This qualitative case study contrasts the experiences of three states that dropped performance funding in whole or in part (Missouri, Washington, and Florida) and a fourth (Tennessee) that has retained it more than 30 years. Discussion: Our analysis is based on documentary records and extensive interviews with higher education officials, legislators and staff governors and advisors, business leaders, minority group leaders, researchers, and outside consultants. Our findings concur with but also go beyond prior analyses of the demise of state performance funding systems. We concur that higher education opposition played a key role in this demise, stimulated by a perception of inadequate consultation with higher education institutions, use of performance indicators that institutions found invalid, high implementation costs to institutions, and erosion of campus autonomy. At the same time, our analysis turned up other causes of higher education opposition to performance funding that were not discovered by previous studies. A major cause of higher education opposition was the downturn in state finances in the early 2000s, which led institutions to focus on preserving their core state funding and giving up performance funding, Higher education opposition was also provoked if performance funding took the form not of adding to existing state funding but instead holding back a portion of the state appropriation and requiring institutions to earn it back through improved performance. These findings agree and disagree with theories and findings in the research literatures on polio), termination and program sustainability. Conclusions/Recommendations: If its advocates are to create a sustainable basis, for state performance funding, they must find ways to insulate its funding from the ups and downs of the state revenue cycle, better secure the support of public institutions, and expand its breadth political support by reaching out, for example, to business and to social groups driven primarily by the values educational equality rather than educational efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The regulation of intracellular calcium by the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) plays a critical role in neuronal function. While the consequences associated with depleting calcium from the ER have been studied in multiple systems, it is not known whether the intrinsic properties of a neuron change in response to such perturbations. In this study, we demonstrate that the depletion of calcium from the ER of hippocampal CA1 pyramidal neurons induces a persistent, perisomatic increase in the density of functional h channels resulting in a reduction in intrinsic excitability and an increase in the optimal response frequency. This form of intrinsic plasticity is dependent on the elevation of cytoplasmic calcium, inositol triphosphate receptors, store-operated calcium channels, and the protein kinase A pathway. We postulate that this form of depletion-induced intrinsic plasticity is a neuroprotective mechanism that reduces excitability after depletion of calcium stores triggered through altered network activity during pathological conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines various commonalities and divergences between the English further education system and its nearest US equivalent, the community college system. In terms of commonalities, the article discusses the reliance on sub-university institutions to provide access to higher education, persistent dilemmas attendant to that reliance and conflicts over efforts to make non-university post-secondary institutions become more specialised in their missions. With regard to divergences, this article examines differences between the two types of institution in the strength of transfer arrangements, the ability to award the baccalaureate degree, the competitive environment and the balance between national and sub-national governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the editor's notes for this winter issue of the journal. This issue discusses the community college's societal and functional missions. The challenges and opportunities as well as the developments made through time. The social implications of these and the institutional accountability for students.

This chapter describes the evolution of the workforce development mission and its current crisis in the face of changing training demands, shriveling government support, and rising competition. Two alternative future paths are outlined: a baccalaureate degree-oriented new vocationalism and a renewed emphasis on serving the training needs of low-income adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter analyzes various ways of conceptualizing the missions of the community college, describes how those missions have varied over time and across geographical regions, and examines how missions complement and conflict with one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing policy interest in community colleges as gateways to the baccalaureate degree naturally raises the question of how equitably transfer opportunities are distributed by student background and what factors may explain background differences that might be found. We analyze two nationally representative data sets to examine how the likelihood of transfer is affected by social background, precollege academic characteristics, external demands at college entrance, and experiences during college. We find that high-SES students have significantly higher transfer rates, in part because of advantages in precollege academic preparation and educational aspirations. Older college entrants are much less likely to transfer than students entering college right out of high school, and a significant portion of this age gap is more often due to having children, lower educational aspirations, and a vocational major, and being enrolled part time. Though women and nonwhites differ from men and whites in transfer rates, these differences are not statistically significant. But there is an important caveat: blacks tend to have higher educational aspirations than whites of the same socioeconomic background. When we control for educational aspirations, thus removing this black aspirational advantage, the black-white gap in transfer rates widens considerably, becoming statistically significant in one of our samples but not the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last three decades, most community colleges have broadened their economic development role to include contracting with employers to train current or prospective employees in job and academic skills. This article describes the main contours of the community college's involvement in contract training, explains how this involvement arose, and analyzes its impact on the community college. This analysis is based both on national data on the general prevalence and form of contract training and on case studies of the forms it takes in twenty community colleges in five states servicing five quite different industries. Contract training is sometimes quite elaborate, as in the case of the entry-level training of skilled workers in auto manufacturing, auto repair, and construction. Here the training often involves multi-year apprenticeships, combining both classroom and on-the-job training, with labor unions exercising a major role. But contract training often is much briefer and dominated by the wishes of companies. The origins of contract training lie in a combination both of business pressure and of initiative by community colleges and government bodies pursuing interests and values of their own. Contract training has broadly affected community colleges in such areas as enrollments, revenues, external relations, governance, internal relations, curriculum and pedagogy, and institutional mission. It has brought more students, revenues, and political clout, but also greater business involvement in community college governance and possibly a major redefinition of institutional mission away from education (especially transfer education) toward training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines why the idea of school choice was reborn in the 1980s in the United States. Renewed interest among conservatives; Changes in sentiment towards public schooling; State relative autonomy theory of political power.

Opinion. Comments on trends in mass higher education in the United States based on the US Department of Education's report `The Condition of Education 1997.' Origins of mass higher education; Consequences of mass higher education; Social and political issues involved in universalizing higher education.

Opportunity-to-learn (OTL) standards commendably try to force schools to confront how they serve or subvert students' achievement. Unfortunately, the current standards ignore much sociological research on the sources of students' attainment. They disregard in-school factors, such as racial and class segregation and curricular and instructional differentiation, and extra-school factors, such as class and racial differences in home environments, educational aspirations, and knowledge of how schooling works. Advocates of OTL also overlook how controversial these standards are liable to be in a society as diverse and educationally oriented as the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the perceived perils and prospects of United States community colleges. Dwindling resources; Negative side effects of coping with financial decline; Burden of postsecondary remedial education; Inadequate facilitation of baccalaureate attainment; Positive prospects community colleges face.

A hallmark of recent higher education policy in developed economies is the move towards quasi-markets involving greater student choice and provider competition, underpinned by cost-sharing policies. This paper examines the idealizations and illusions of student choice and marketization in higher education policy in England, although the overall conclusions have relevance for other countries whose higher education systems are shaped by neoliberal thinking. First, it charts the evolution of the student-choice rationale through an analysis of government commissioned reports, white papers, and legislation, focusing on policy rhetoric and the purported benefits of increasing student choice and provider competition. Second, the paper tests the predictions advanced by the student-choice rationale—increased and wider access, improved institutional quality, and greater provider responsiveness to the labour market—and finds them largely not met. Finally, the paper explores how conceptual deficiencies in the student-choice model explain why the idealization of student choice has largely proved illusionary. Government officials have narrowly conceptualized students as rational calculators primarily weighing the economic costs and benefits of higher education and the relative quality of institutions and programs. There is little awareness that student choices are shaped by several other factors as well and that these vary considerably by social background. The paper concludes that students' choices are socially constrained and stratified, reproducing and legitimating social inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]