Press Release | 13. September 2007
Ford Foundation Grant to Strengthen Research in Higher Education
The Ford Foundation recently awarded a grant to Columbia University's Quantitative Methods and Social Sciences (QMSS) Master's degree program. The funding will be used to launch an initiative to strengthen the methodological and policy-related training of doctoral students in the field of higher education. The program, which draws on the strengths of Columbia's QMSS program and the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP), is designed to strengthen the linkages between educational policy and scholarship in higher education.
According to Christopher Weiss, Director of the QMSS program, "With this initiative, we have the opportunity to draw upon the success of QMSS in developing an innovative interdisciplinary curriculum and apply it to the study of higher education."
In response to calls for more appropriate technical research methods, the Ford Foundation-funded initiative aims to equip doctoral candidates with the advanced quantitative, analytical, and conceptual tools they need to make empirically-based causal statements about higher education, which will ultimately affect policy outcomes. Capitalizing on new techniques and methodologies, students in the program will develop their capacity to use specialized tools to collect and analyze data.
Unlike the field of health research, critics contend that education research often lacks the methods that would allow it to easily translate its findings into strong causal statements, which can in turn be translated quickly into effective policy decisions. Despite the great numbers of researchers studying schools, teachers, students, and processes of schooling, the overall quality of educational research is relatively underdeveloped.
Christopher Weiss is especially interested in incorporating research from other realms of the social sciences. He contends that in the study of higher education, scholars have too often taken a limited view of the policies shaping colleges, universities, and their students. Generally, research in this area has focused narrowly on factors related to a specific set of features directly related to higher education, such as access, finances, enrollment, and persistence. While these facets are important, a number of factors that influence higher education have been neglected. Criminal justice policy, labor market characteristics, and socio-demographic forces all help shape the processes and practices of higher education, yet have received little attention from scholars in the higher education field. The program, in its interdisciplinary approach, takes a broader view of the problem of higher education in the United States, while its emphasis on advanced quantitative analysis anchors that view to a tradition of innovative quantitative methods that can be relied upon to inform policy decisions.
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