The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a $699,000 grant for research and training in higher education economics to the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute (CHERI).

Ronald G. Ehrenberg, CHERI's director and Cornell's Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics, said the four-year grant allows continued flexibility in the study of a wide range of higher education issues. CHERI has received Mellon Foundation funding since 1998.

In the next year, he said, three projects are slated to go forward with the Mellon funding. They are:

• Determining if gender composition of top academic administrators, college and university trustees, and trustee board chairs influences the rate at which colleges and universities diversify faculty across gender lines.
• Exploring the role of non-instructional spending by colleges and universities on graduation and retention rates of low-income students and other underrepresented populations.
• Testing whether New York state Bundy Aid awards to certain independent postsecondary education institutions are positively linked to transfer and graduation rates of college and university students.

Through undergraduate and graduate research positions created at CHERI by Mellon grants, many students have been helped prepare for positions in higher education, Ehrenberg said.

The grants give CHERI flexibility to study higher education issues including: implications of growing wealth disparities across academic institutions; growing costs and importance of science to universities; financial challenges facing public higher education; the changing nature of faculty; governance in academic institutions; improving doctoral education in the humanities and associated social sciences; improving persistence rates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics majors; and reducing inequality in higher education access and persistence.

The flexibility to move across topics is especially important during this period of economic decline, Ehrenberg said.

"There is going to be a fundamental change in how public and private higher education institutions operate over the next decade and the pressures that they will face from the federal and state governments," he noted.

Mary Catt is a staff writer for the ILR school.