This blog has been fairly quiet through the month of April, a notable difference from my goal of writing about two posts per week. While I greatly enjoy being able to write my thoughts on timely issues in the higher education world, there are times when my day job doesn’t readily allow for time necessary to think through and write a post—let alone keep up with the news. But I do want to take a few minutes to share the reasons why I’ve been so busy, as well as why May will likely be a fairly slow month on this blog.
First of all, I’m preparing to defend my dissertation (three essays on higher education policy) toward the end of next week. The last few weeks have been fairly frantic as I’ve made substantial changes to two chapters before I sent them to my committee last week. Although there will certainly be a lot of changes required after my defense, it feels great to be ready to defend. I will be happy to share the dissertation chapters with anyone who is interested after final revisions have been made.
At the end of this week, I am flying to California to give a presentation at the annual Education Writers’ Association seminar at Stanford University. I was asked to give a talk on my research in the area of input-adjusted metrics in measuring institutional effectiveness, and particularly how adjusting for cost changes the ordering of institutions. This talk will be in front of a large group of journalists who cover education on a regular basis, which is a neat opportunity.
Finally, on the teaching front, I am giving my final lecture of the semester tomorrow on accountability and performance measures to a mixed undergraduate/grad student class on debates in higher education policy. I’ve really enjoyed giving several previous lectures, and this one has particular meaning to me as it is something that is both very policy-relevant and fun to teach.
I hope to get a post or two up sometime in the next two weeks, so please send along any ideas that you would like for me to explore in future posts. Until then, it’s back to the fun world of cleaning and coding administrative datasets!
Robert Kelchen 