After more than two decades of state disinvestment, the University of California faces significant challenges and misunderstandings regarding its operating costs, its wide array of activities, and its mission. Reduced funding from the state for public higher education, including UC, has essentially severed the historic link between state allocations and enrollment, altering the incentive and ability for UC to expand academic programs and enrollment in pace with California’s growing population. “To grow or not to grow?,” that is the question. This macro management and major modification in UC’s historical social contract with the people of California confronts the new president, Janet Napolitano, and, more generally, the UC academic community and Californians. On the positive side, there are signs of an improved economy as well as a governor and legislature dealing with fundamental budget issues, such as better controlling public pensions and reducing exorbitant incarceration rates. If California, under a revised Master Plan, floats toward an attempt to recreate a suitable funding and organizational model for public higher education, Napolitano is potentially a powerful political figure who could help drive it to a successful conclusion. To truly reach a solution, public leaders will need to work with lawmakers, not the other way around.

Bolstered by the recommendations of the 1998 Boyer Report, US federal agencies have put significant resources into promoting opportunities for undergraduates to engage in research. American universities and colleges have been creating support programs and curricular opportunities intended to create a “culture of undergraduate research.” Yet our knowledge about the commonality of undergraduate research engagement—how it integrates into the educational experience, and its benefits or lack thereof—is still very limited. Universities exude the ideal of a pivotal link of teaching and research. We have assumed that personal interactions between active scholars and undergraduates—via traditional curriculum, research courses, working in a lab or doing fieldwork—have positive influences on students’ maturation and their overall academic and social experience. The following exploratory study looks at data generated by the 2010 Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) undergraduate survey, an online census administered at fifteen major research-intensive universities. Among this specific case study of mostly AAU campuses, there is evidence that undergraduate research engagement outside of the traditional classroom is a relatively common experience. Further, this research engagement leads to self-reported learning gains across many areas, but especially in the areas of field knowledge, how to present and communicate knowledge, research skills, higher levels of satisfaction about educational experiences, better use of time, and higher levels of non-quantitative skills. Yet not all research activities are created equally. This study identified two different types of research: those research activities that mainly involve assisting faculty research, and those that mainly involve conducting independent personal research. The former is more prevalent in STEM fields, while the latter is more likely in the humanities, social sciences, and in professional majors. Further, lower-division students also tend to participate in assisting faculty research more often than their upper-division peers, who are more likely to engage in independent research. As part of the ongoing SERU research agenda, we hope to generate a more extensive analysis of SERU data and other data sources. We suggest that SERU campuses consider amending their current curricular requirements based on the following recommendations resulting from this investigation: 1. use the SERU database to provide regular reports on undergraduate research engagement, and include those reports in Academic Program/Department reviews; 2. expand existing efforts so that most, if not all, undergraduates have the opportunity for two or more non-classroom forms of research engagement, perhaps depending on the field of the major and discipline.

After almost four decades of “just deserts,” the past several years have seen a remarkable resurgence of risk assessment as an essential component of criminal sanctioning. In this article, we review current practice in the incorporation of risk assessment into the sanctioning systems of several illustrative states, and describe the major dimensions on which state practices differ. We then elaborate the various meanings ascribed to the foundational concept of “risk” in criminal sanctioning, and contrast “risk” with what are now often called “criminogenic needs,” the fulfillment of which ostensibly reduce an offender’s level of “risk.” Finally, we address the choice of an approach to risk assessment in sentencing, particularly in the resource-starved state of current correctional practice.

Beginning with the 1996 federal welfare reform law many of the central safety net programs in the U.S. eliminated eligibility for legal immigrants, who had been previously eligible on the same terms as citizens. These dramatic cutbacks affected eligibility not only for cash welfare assistance for families with children, but also for food stamps, Medicaid, SCHIP, and SSI. In this paper, we comprehensively examine the status of the U.S. safety net for immigrants and their family members. We document the policy changes that affected immigrant eligibility for these programs and use the CPS for 1995-2010 to analyze trends in program participation, income, and poverty among immigrants (and natives). We pay particular attention to the recent period and examine how immigrants and their children are faring in the “Great Recession” with an eye toward revealing how these policy changes have affected the success of the safety net in protecting this population.