Understanding Minority-Serving Institutions:

Understanding Minority-Serving Institutions explores these important institutions while also highlighting their interconnectedness, with the hope of sparking collaboration among the various types. Minority-serving institutions (MSIs) enroll and graduate the majority of students of color in the United States and traditionally include historically Black colleges and universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, tribal colleges, and more recently Asian American– and Pacific Islander–serving institutions. Article Review

Community Colleges As Gateways and Gatekeepers:
Moving beyond the Access “Saga” toward Outcome Equity

By Alicia C. Dowd

In this essay, Alicia C. Dowd draws attention to the challenges facing community colleges as they seek to balance their roles as both gateways and gatekeepers with their multiple missions, which include meeting the diverse needs of students at the postsecondary level and responding to the changing educational and economic needs of U.S. society.

Lumina Foundation
Students aren't just data point, but numbers do count

Going under the microscope to create macro-level change

Estela Mara Bensimon considers her work a return to her roots as a community organizer working on behalf of Puerto Rican youth in New Jersey’s poorest cities in the early 1970s. These days, Bensimon isn’t a street-level activist, she’s a researcher – the founding director of the Center for Urban Education (CUE) within the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education. Still, CUE specializes in what Bensimon calls “action research” and reflects the professor’s determination “not to write anymore only for people like myself. I wanted to do something that brings about change.”

Frank Harris III, Estela Mara Bensimon (2007) (77-84)
The Equity Scorecard: A Collaborative Approach to Assess and Respond to Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Student Outcome
The Equity Scorecard, a nationally recognized and widelyused organizational learning process designed to fosterinstitutional change through the identification and elimi-nation of racial disparities among college students, isdescribed in this chapter. The effectiveness of this processand its potential impact are also discussed.

Tornatzky, L.G., Macias, E.E., Jenkins, D., & Solis, C. (2006). Access and Achievement: Building Educational and Career Pathways for Latinos in Advanced Technology. Los Angeles, CA: The Tomás Rivera Policy Institute.

Researchers from The Tomás Rivera Policy Institute examined Latino access to and achievement in technical career paths. The study finds persistent patterns of under-representation by Latinos, African-Americans, and women in the knowledge economy in technical career paths, despite projected data that the future workforce will be heavily comprised of these demographic groups.

Pak, J., Bensimon, E.M., Malcom, L., Marquez, A., Park, K. (2006). The Life Histories of Ten Individuals Who Crossed the Border between Community Colleges and Selective Four-Year Colleges. Lansdowne, VA: Jack Kent Cooke Foundation.

This article highlights case studies of ten community college highly qualified, low-income students who successfully transferred from a community college into a selective four-year university.

Bensimon, E.M., Ward, K., Sanders, K. (2000). The Department Chair's Role in Developing New Faculty into Teachers and Scholars. Anker Publishing.

This book is designed to help chairs with the three critical stages of junior faculty socialization: 1) recruitment and hiring; 2) the first year; and 3) evaluating new faculty performance. The authors offer concrete advice and activities; make extensive use of real-life situations; and provide generic examples of letters, checklists, and orientations that can be adapted to individual contexts.

Dowd, A. C., Bensimon, E. M., Gabbard, G., Singleton, S., Macias, E. E., Dee, J. R., et al. (2006). Transfer access to elite colleges and universities in the United States: Threading the needle of the American dream. Lansdowne, VA: Jack Kent Cooke Foundation.

Reports findings from the Community College Transfer Initiative (CCTI)—a national study of the opportunities that selective schools offer to high-ability, low-income community college transfer students. The project involved site visits to 16 postsecondary institutions (8 selective four-year institutions, and 8 community colleges) across the country to identify institutional policies and practices that contribute to high rates of community college students transferring to highly selective four-year institutions. The study was conducted jointly by researchers from the New England Resource Center for Higher Education at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and at the Center for Urban Education and the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute at the University of Southern California. CCTI was co-funded by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, the Lumina Foundation for Education, and the Nellie Mae Foundation.

Pena, E. V., Bensimon, E. M., Colyar, J. C. (2006). Contextual problem defining: Learning to think and act from the standpoint of equity. Liberal Education, 92(2), 48-55.

The Center for Urban Education have developed and pilot-tested an institutional change intervention designed to increase awareness of the differences in educational outcomes across racial and ethnic groups, and to encourage “equity-mindedness” in campus members who seek to eliminate them.

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Bensimon, E. M. (2006). Learning equity-mindedness: Equality in educational outcomes. The Academic Workplace, 17(1), 2-5; 18-21.

This issue reflects NERCHE’s commitment to extending and deepening our understanding of diversity in higher education through the lead article, “Learning Equity-mindedness: Equality in Educational Outcomes,” by Estela Mara Bensimon.

Polkinghorne, Donald E. Practice and the Human Sciences: The Case for a Judgement-Based Practice of Care .

Teachers, nurses, psychotherapists, and other practitioners of care are under pressure to substitute specific, prescribed techniques in place of using their own judgment. Donald E. Polkinghorne assembles the case for the return to judgment-based practice for the professions that engage in direct person-to-person interaction with those they serve. Set in the larger context of the technification of society, Polkinghorne draws from Weber, Heidegger, Ihde, Bourdieu, de Certeau, and other philosophers to trace the advancing power of the technological worldview in Western culture and uses Aristotle, Dewey, and Gadamer to help make his case that we should be doing things very differently.

Dowd, A. C., & Grant, J. L. (2006). Equity and efficiency of community college appropriations: The role of local financing. . The Review of Higher Education, 29(2), 167-194.

This study analyzes the equity of community college financing and demonstrates intrastate variations in appropriations to community colleges. The ratio of 90th to 10th percentile values ranges from 2.0 to 2.8 in half of the states analyzed, levels which are considered high in comparison to K-12 finance inequities. In 10 states with high revenue disparities, the direction of revenue deviations is more often progressive in state-funded than in local-share states, suggesting that the local role may undermine equity. This paper explores differences in economies of scale, geographic costs, and program costs as factors determining funding disparities.

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Bensimon, E., M., & Ordorika, I. (2006). Mexico's Estimulos: Faculty Compensation Based on Piecework. In R. A. Rhoads & C. A. Torres (Eds.) The University, State, and Market: The Political Economy of Globalization in the Americas. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

This volume explores the complex relationships among universities, states, and markets throughout the Americas in light of the growing influence of globalization. It offers a biting critique of neoliberal globalization and its anti-democratic elements. In seeking to challenge the hegemony of neoliberal globalization, the authors highlight the ways in which corporate capitalism, academic capitalism, and increased militarization-both in the form of terrorism and in the international war against terrorism-are directing societies and institutions.

Dowd, A. C. (2005). Data Don't Drive: Building a Practitioner-Driven Culture of Inquiry to Assess Community College Performance. Research Report by Lumina Foundation for Education

This report explores a range of data-based benchmarking practices. In examining these various practices, Dowd builds a compelling case, not merely for data-driven decisions, but for decisions based on thoughtful interpretation and use of data by well-informed and well-supported practitioners at the nation's community colleges. The report also attempts to gauge the practical value of these various methods by assessing their capacity to truly inform understanding of institutional productivity and effectiveness in serving students.

The report reiterates two crucial issues for all who are engaged in the important work of enhancing student success. First, reliable data must guide decisions about what types of services are offered to students. Dowd suggests that only by collecting and properly analyzing sufficient information can educators and administrators identify areas of greatest need and implement the most effective steps to meet those needs. Second, people charged with collecting, analyzing and using the data must have the expertise and the resources to do their jobs effectively.

Bauman, G. L. (2005), Promoting Organizational Learning in Higher Education to Achieve Equity in Educational Outcomes. In A.Kezar (Ed.), Organizational Learning in Higher Education. New Directions for Higher Education (No. 131, 23-35). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. This chapter describes a project in which teams of faculty, administrators, and staff from fourteen colleges and universities engaged in organizational learning for the purposes of identifying and improving inequitable educational outcomes for African American and Latino students.

Bensimon, E. M. (2005), Closing the Achievement Gap in Higher Education: An Organizational Learning Perspective. In A.Kezar (Ed.),Organizational Learning in Higher Education. New Directions for Higher Education (No. 131, 99-111). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. The author uses the theory and process of organizational learning to make a case for how to understand and address the cultural and structural barriers that preclude colleges and universities from producing equitable educational outcomes for students.

Bensimon, E. M. (2005). Equality as a fact, equality as a result: A matter of institutional accountability. Monograph commissioned by the American Council on Education.

This paper focuses on whether institutional accountability has been overlooked in the quest to achieve diversity on American college and university campuses. The author suggests that higher education institutions have a responsibility to modify their environments so that students of color have as much opportunity for success as their white counterparts.

Bauman, G.L., Bustillos, L.T., Bensimon, E.M., Brown, M.C., Bartee, R.D. (2005). Achieving Equitable Educational Outcomes with All Students: The Institution's Roles and Responsibilities. Monograph commissioned by the Association for American Colleges and Universities.

The authors discuss the responsibility institutions have to examine the impact that traditional higher education practices have on those students historically underserved by higher education, including African American, Latino/a, and American Indian students. Given the persistent achievement gap facing many students, institutions must systematically gather evidence of what does and does not work for historically underserved students and build institutional reform around such evidence. Included is one campus's process for systematically monitoring students' achievement and for addressing the inequities it discovered.

Bensimon, E.M., Ward, K., Sanders, K. (2000). The Department Chair's Role in Developing New Faculty into Teachers and Scholars. Anker Publishing.

This book is designed to help chairs with the three critical stages of junior faculty socialization: 1) recruitment and hiring; 2) the first year; and 3) evaluating new faculty performance. The authors offer concrete advice and activities; make extensive use of real-life situations; and provide generic examples of letters, checklists, and orientations that can be adapted to individual contexts.