An invitational international symposium held in April 2013 honored Dr. Philip Altbach, former University at Buffalo Professor and founder of GSE’s Center for Comparative and Global Studies in Education, who went to Boston College to found the Center for International Higher Education, the principal center of its kind in the world. The symposium introduced a Festschrift in honor of Dr. Altbach published in 2013 by Springer entitled At the Forefront of International Higher Education. Dr. Johnstone’s chapter in the Festschrift is Tuition Fees, Student Loans, and Other Manifestations of Cost-Sharing: Variations and Misconceptions.

Dr. Raechele Pope, Associate Professor and Coordinator of Higher Education Student Affairs Program of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy, received the 2013 Annuit Coeptis Award by the American College Personnel Association (ACPA). ACPA’s Annuit Coeptis Award is given to a Senior Professional for her commitment to the student affairs profession and for her outstanding accomplishments as a student affairs professional.

One of the ACPA colleagues has eloquently summed up the 2013 Annuit Coeptis honoree: “For nearly ninety years that ACPA has been a powerful presence and voice for student affairs professionals, many fine individuals have emerged to lead, shape, and advance the association. Raechele Pope is one of those individuals who has shown a distinct commitment to linking scholarship with practice. Recognizing her with Annuit Coeptis Award acknowledges her substantial impact.”

Dr. Pope was recognized as a 2013 honoree at the ACPA Leadership and Corporate Partner’s Reception on March 3, 2013 in Las Vegas.

Dr. Bruce Johnstone was invited at the end of January 2013 to present at a Symposium, Equity in Higher Education for Economic Development, sponsored by Aarhus University and Empower European Universities (EEU). Dr. Johnstone’s presentation was entitled Higher Education’s Worldwide Dilemmas, which focused on Europe’s access – equity dilemma in light of the following ten propositions:

1. high and annually increasing costs and revenue needs at rates generally exceeding the prevailing rates of inflation;
2. a preoccupation with classical research universities and a relative neglect of public shorter cycle alternatives;
3. high & unsustainable drains on tax revenues for pensions and health care;
4. resulting imperative for (a) lower unit costs and (b) more non-tax revenues;
5. complicated by the great political resistance in virtually all European countries to regular, significant, & sustainable tuition fees;
6. the inability of economies to absorb all projected increasing numbers of university graduates in high knowledge content jobs;
7. resulting in rising levels of graduate unemployment and unmanageable debts;
8. exacerbated by the persistence of high failure and non-completion rates on the participation margin;
9. the high correlation of the participation margin with those who are poor, from linguistic and ethnic minority groups, and from single parent families;
10. political & social ambivalence and lack of consensus on clash between: (1) the fact of persistent inequalities; and (2) the fact of higher education more likely to accentuate than to mitigate widening social class disparities.

GSE Dean Jaekyung Lee has been named an honorary fellow of the American Educational Research Association. The purpose of the AERA Fellows Program is to honor education researchers with substantial research accomplishments, to convey the association’s commitment to excellence in research, and to enable the next generation of emerging scholars to appreciate the value of sustained achievements in research and the breadth of scholarship worthy of recognition.

The AERA Fellows Program is intended to recognize excellence in research and be inclusive of the scholarship that constitutes and enriches education research as an interdisciplinary field. Fellows are nominated by their peers, selected and recommended by the Fellows Committee, and approved by the AERA Council, the association’s elected governing group.

In addition to his role as dean, Dr. Lee is a professor from the Department of Counseling, School, and Educational Psychology. His scholarly research agenda includes education accountability policy and high-stakes testing; P-16 education pathways and school interventions; educational equity and achievement gaps; and international and comparative research. He was previously recognized by AERA with their 2007 Early Career Award.

SUNY Distinguished Professor Lois Weis, from the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy, has been elected to membership in the National Academy of Education (NAEd). The academy advances the highest quality education research and its use in policy formation and practice. Founded in 1965, NAEd consists of U.S. members and foreign associates who are elected on the basis of outstanding scholarship related to education.

In addition to serving on expert study panels that address pressing issues in education, members are also deeply engaged in NAEd’s professional development programs such as the NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship Program and NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship Program.

Dr. Weis is considered one of the most preeminent researchers in the world today on economic and social class issues as they broadly relate to schools and educational institutions. Her ethnographic research has provided new ways to understand and further study the connection between and among social class, race, gender, schooling, and the global economy, and she is widely known for breaking new theoretical and methodological ground related to these issues.

During her 35-year career Dr. Weis has been a prolific scholar, having authored or co-authored 23 books, 60 journal articles, and 45 book chapters. Her research has been supported by generous grants from the Association for Institutional Research, Carneige Foundation, National Science Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation, and she has been on the editorial boards of numerous leading journals in education. Most recently Dr. Weis served as an editor of the American Educational Research Journal, widely considered the most prestigious research journal in the education field.

Dr. Weis is a winner of the outstanding book award from the Gustavus Meyers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America. She is an Honorary Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, and has delivered invited lectures worldwide, most recently at Beijing Normal University; Minzou University in China; University of Almeria, Spain; and the University of Southampton, UK.

The College of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School of Education have been awarded E Funding for their collaborative proposal, A Human Capital Agenda for Educational and Economic Development.

The proposal’s agenda aims to generate collaborative research on major educational policy issues including the efficiency of comparative education/financing systems, the private and social returns on investments in learning and training, and the role of human capital in promoting economic development. Human capital is increasingly recognized as the engine of economic growth and social mobility in the global information economy of the 21st century.

GSE faculty contributing to the proposal include Dr. Jaekyung Lee, Dr. Bruce Johnstone, Dr. Jeremy Finn, Dr. Janina Brutt-Griffler, Dr. Nathan Daun-Barnett, and Dr. Stephen Dunnett.

Dr. Bruce Johnstone was invited to speak in November 2012 at the 12th Annual Beijing Forum, an international conference approved by the Ministry of Education and sponsored by the Beijing Municipal Government, Peking University, and the Korea Foundation. The overall theme was The Harmony of Civilizations and Prosperity for All. I addressed the panel entitled: Improve Education in the Changing World Economy: Quality, Equity, and Efficiency. Dr. Johnstone’s paper was entitled Financial Austerity and the Prospect of Profound Change in Higher Education.

2012 Annual Conference of the Chinese Society for Economics of Education

Immediately after, and in conjunction with, the Beijing Forum and the Annual Conference of the Chinese Society for Economics of Education, Dr. Johnstone presented another paper at the International Forum on the Economics of Education. This paper was entitled The Politics of Higher Education: Common Misunderstandings about the Financing of Higher Education and was published (in Chinese) in Peking University Education Review, Vol. II, No. 2, 2013. Among the ten propositions that Dr. Johnstone labelled as misunderstandings were, for examples:

• High public sector tuition fees (e.g., in the range of 30 to 50 percent of instructional costs) reflects a prevailing political/ideological assumption that most of the benefits of higher education are private. Similarly, low or no tuition fees reflects the view that the benefits are predominantly social, or public; or
• If a country is persuaded that public sector tuition fees are financially necessary (whether up-front or deferred) and that student loans must be offered (whether to cover tuition fees and the costs of student living or both), the loans should be repayable as a percentage of future earning rather than repayable on a fixed schedule of payments, like a mortgage or a conventional consumer loan.