By Chronicle Staff. Report: “Revisiting the Relationship Between Institutional Rank and Student Engagement”
Authors: John D. Zilvinskis, research project associate, and Louis Rocconi, assistant scientist, both at Indiana University at Bloomington’s Center for Postsecondary Research
Summary: The researchers sought to determine what, if any, relationship existed between student engagement at any given college and how highly that institution was ranked by U.S. News & World Report, Forbes, or Washington Monthly. Their study examined data on more than 80,000 freshmen and seniors at 64 colleges ranked by each of the three magazines in 2013. More...

By Chronicle Staff. Report: “Faculty Hiring and Tenure by Sex and Race: New Evidence From a National Survey”
Authors: Mark R. Connolly, associate research scientist, and the assistant researchers You-Geon Lee and Julia N. Savoy, all at the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Wisconsin Center for Education Research
Summary: The researchers examined the career trajectories of people with doctorates in the STEM disciplines — science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — and related fields to try to determine why women and black or Hispanic people remain especially underrepresented in college faculty positions in those areas. The analysis used recent data from the Survey of Doctorate Recipients, a long-term National Science Foundation study that collects information on doctoral recipients in the STEM fields, social sciences, psychology, and economics over the course of their lives. More...

By Chronicle Staff. Report: “What Happens Before? A Field Experiment Exploring How Pay and Representation Differentially Shape Bias on the Pathway Into Organizations”Authors: Katherine L. Milkman of the University of Pennsylvania, Modupe Akinola of Columbia University, and Dolly Chugh of New York University
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology, a publication of the American Psychological Association
Summary: White male students are much more likely than female or minority students to hear back from faculty members when they send emails asking to meet to talk about the professors’ work and the students’ prospects for doctoral study, a study has found. More...

By Chronicle Staff. Report: “Focused on What Matters: Assessment of Student Learning Outcomes at Minority-Serving Institutions”
Authors: Erick Montenegro and Natasha A. Jankowski
Organizations: National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment and Penn Center for Minority-Serving Institutions
Summary: Minority-serving institutions are more likely than those that predominantly serve white students to use assessments of student learning for internal purposes, such as strategic planning and budgeting. More...

By Chronicle Staff. Report: “The State of Higher Ed Branding: A Survey of Marketing Leaders”
Authors: Deborah Maue and Tom Hayes
Organization: mStoner Inc.
Summary: While many people in higher education remain uneasy about branding in the groves of academe, a new report indicates that it is becoming pervasive. More...

By Charles Huckabee. Arizona State University is joining with the MOOC provider edX in a project that it says “reimagines the freshman year” and opens a new low-cost, low-risk path to a college degree for students anywhere in the world. More...

By Charles Huckabee. The University of Missouri at Kansas City allowed its business school to run up an operating deficit of nearly $11 million as it pursued a national and global reputation, since tarnished by a rankings scandal, The Kansas City Star reports. More...

By Kelly Field. The head of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities System said on Wednesday that a campus of Middlesex Community College that had been slated for closure in the face of proposed budget cuts would stay open after all, following intense pressure from members of the state’s legislature, The Connecticut Mirror reported. More...

By Kelly Field. A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit brought by a group of student-loan debt collectors that the U.S. Department of Education fired in March.
The ruling, which dismissed the collectors’ request for a stay of the agency’s decision, came just over a month after the department abruptly canceled its contracts with the companies — Coast Professional, Enterprise Recovery Systems, National Recoveries, Pioneer Credit Recovery, and West Asset Management — which it said had provided inaccurate information to borrowers. More...

By Andy Thomason. Bill Clinton will step down as honorary chancellor of the for-profit giant Laureate Education Inc., after five years in the post, Bloomberg News reports. The company said the former president’s departure was not related to the presidential campaign of his wife, Hillary Clinton, who has begun to denounce “bad actors” in the for-profit sector. More...