more impressive with each exposure to it. Everything has changed and nothing has changed since Democracy in America was published in the 1830’s. Its author grasped with remarkable perception both the mutable and the immutable qualities of man. There could be nothing more salutary for us today than to assimilate his fine sense of what was permanent in a world which, like ours, was undergoing deep convulsions. Committed to the classical economics of Adam Smith, Tocqueville did not share Smith’s illusions about the eternal nature of the market. On the contrary, as Albert Salomon has emphasized, his point of view

Democracy in America: An Appreciation On the Occasion of the Centennial of Tocqueville's Death

Acknowledgments vii Preface xiii Chapter 1. Educational Attainment: Overall Trends, Disparities, and the Public Universities We Study 1 Chapter 2. Bachelor's Degree Attainment on a National Level 20 Chapter 3. Finishing College at Public Universities 32 Chapter 4. Fields of Study, Time-to-Degree, and College Grades 57 Chapter 5. High Schools and "Undermatching" 87 Chapter 6. Test Scores and High School Grades as Predictors 112 Chapter 7. Transfer Students and the Path from Two-Year to Four-Year Colleges 134 Chapter 8. Financial Aid and Pricing on a National Level 149 Chapter 9. Financial Aid at Public Universities 166 Chapter 10. Institutional Selectivity and Institutional Effects 192 Chapter 11. Target Populations 207 Chapter 12. Looking Ahead 223 Appendix A. The Modern Evolution of America's Flagship Universities by Eugene M. Tobin 239 Notes 265 List of Figures 337 List of Tables 347 List of Appendix Tables 349 References 357 Index 377

Crossing the Finish Line:: Completing College at America’s Public Universities (Association for Institutional Research, May 30, 2010)

Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa University of Chicago Press, 2011 This book has much to say that is perceptive about today's undergraduate higher education in the United States. It will be valuable to review the authors' insights. At the same time, it will be as instructive to note the book's weaknesses, and especially what is omitted from the discussion. It is a discussion that is truncated intellectually by the authors' close adherence to the selective awareness that so greatly typifies the mindscape of the contemporary American "establishment" in academia and throughout the commanding heights of American society. That mindscape allows a recognition of many things, but not of others. The authors are both faculty members at major American universities. Richard Arum is a sociology professor at New York University with a tie to the university's school of education. He is the author of several books on education and director of the Education Research Program sponsored by the Social Science Research Council. His co-author, Josipa Roksa, is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. That the book is published by the University of Chicago Press attests to its presumptive merit. Academically Adrift furnishes an example of something that has long been common in social science writing: a rather thin empirical study serving as the work's own contribution, combined with considerable additional material coming out of the literature on whatever subject is being explored. The function of the authors' own research is thus often to serve more or less as scientistic windowdressing. The reason we say the empiricism for this book is "thin" is that the "longitudinal data of 2,322 students," while seemingly ample, involves students spread over "a diverse range of campuses," including "liberal arts colleges and large research institutions, as well as a number of historically black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving institutions," all "dispersed nationally across all four regions of the country." This must necessarily mean that the "sample" from any given institution or program was quite small. We are told that the authors didn't concern themselves with the appropriateness of each sample, but left the recruitment and retention of the sample's students to each of the respective institutions. The authors acknowledge that the study included fewer men than women, and more good students than those of "lower scholastic ability." So far as this book is concerned, however, the thinness doesn't particularly hurt the content, since so much of what is said doesn't especially depend upon anything unique found by the authors' own research. A brief summary is provided when the authors say that "we will highlight four core 'important lessons' from our research." These are that the institutions and students are "academically adrift" (which is the basis for the book's title), that students gain surprisingly little from their college experience, that there is "persistent and growing inequality" in the students' learning, and that "there is notable variation both within and across institutions" so far as "measurable differences in students' educational experiences" is concerned. Following the lead of former president Derek Bok of Harvard and of the Council for Aid to Education, the authors' ideal for higher education is that it will enhance students' "capacity for critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing." These are the three ingredients measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), which the authors value most among the various assessment tools. The CLA results, they say, show that "growing numbers of students are sent to college at increasingly higher costs, but for a large proportion of them the gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication are either exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent. …

Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses

Colombia used lotteries to distribute vouchers which partially covered the cost of private secondary school for students who maintained satisfactory academic progress. Three years after the lotteries, winners were about 10 percentage points more likely to have finished 8th grade, primarily because they were less likely to repeat grades, and scored 0.2 standard deviations higher on achievement tests. There is some evidence that winners worked less than losers and were less likely to marry or cohabit as teenagers. Benefits to participants likely exceeded the $24 per winner additional cost to the government of supplying vouchers instead of public-school places.

/pdf/vouchers-for-private-schooling-in-colombia-evidence-from-a-2rwlhe9gbu.pdf

Vouchers for Private Schooling in Colombia: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Experiment

Jeremy M. Weinstein, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007 xx +402 pp. £43.00 ISBN 0-521-86077-6 (hardback); £16.99 ISBN 0-521-67797-1 (paperback) Inside Rebellion offers an insightful accoun...

Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence

The effects of decentralization on public sector outputs is much debated but little agreed upon. This paper compares the remarkable case of Bolivia with the more complex case of Colombia to explore decentralization's effects on public education outcomes. In Colombia, decentralization of education finance improved enrollment rates in public schools. In Bolivia, decentralization made government more responsive by re-directing public investment to areas of greatest need. In both countries, investment shifted from infrastructure to primary social services. In both, it was the behavior of smaller, poorer, more rural municipalities that drove these changes.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/DEDPS47.pdf?abstractid=1127016&mirid=5

Decentralization's Effects on Educational Outcomes in Bolivia and Colombia

This article estimates the effect of armed conflict exposure on school drop-out and labor decisions of Colombian children between the ages of 6 and 17. The empirical strategy is based on two-stage duration analysis and biprobit estimations that take into account the endogeneity of conflict. We find that conflict affects children older than 11, inducing them to drop out of school and enter the labor market too early. We find that short-term exposure to violence is the most relevant for these decisions and probable channels of transmission include higher mortality risks, negative economic shocks, and lesser school quality.

Armed Conflict Exposure, Human Capital Investments, And Child Labor: Evidence From Colombia

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/27159/1/Decentralizations_effects_education_world_dev_(LSERO).pdf

Decentralization's effects on educational outcomes in Bolivia and Colombia

Economic theory suggests that inequality should influence crime positively. Yet, the evidence in favor of that hypothesis is weak. Pure cross-sectional analyses show significant positive effects but cannot control for fixed effects. Time series and panel data point to a variety of results, but few turn out being significant. The hypothesis maintained in this paper is that it is a specific part of the distribution, rather than the overall distribution as summarized by conventional inequality measures, that is most likely to influence the rate of (property) crime in a given society. Using a simple theoretical model and panel data in seven Colombian cities over a fifteen-year period, a structural model is proposed that permits identifying the precise segment of the population whose relative income best explains time changes in crime. (JEL: K42, D63, O15)

A structural model of crime and inequality in colombia

" El objetivo de este trabajo es llevar a cabo una investigacion empirica sobre las causas del crimen violento, en particular, la tasa de homicidios y contrastar los resultados con las diversas explicaciones e hipotesis que se han tejido sobre este fenomeno. Este trabajo constituye un avance en la investigacion sobre el tema, pues incluye mediciones para las siete grandes ciudades y municipios del conjunto de variables que segun la literatura esta relacionadas con la violencia. El trabajo esta dividido asi: Primero, se presenta una revision de la literatura reciente sobre las causas de la violencia. Segundo, contiene las fuentes de informacion y la metodologia de construccion de algunas variables. Tercero, describe el comportamiento de las principales variables en su relacion con la tasa de homicidios. Cuarto, muestra los resultados de los distintos modelos econometricos estimados. Y, por ultimo las conclusiones."

Fabio Sánchez

Papers

Decentralization's Effects on Educational Outcomes in Bolivia and Colombia

Armed Conflict Exposure, Human Capital Investments, And Child Labor: Evidence From Colombia

Decentralization's effects on educational outcomes in Bolivia and Colombia

A structural model of crime and inequality in colombia

Determinantes del crimen violento en un país altamente violento: el caso de Colombia