The university accreditation system in Chile appears to be influenced by tensions between interest groups from well-established institutions and newer (private) institutions. These institutions depend to a certain extent on accreditation decisions to obtain indirect public funding. However, the system relies on faculty nominated by conglomerates…

Twenty years ago, Northern Ireland's previously prominent presence in the headlines of the yellow press dwindled to virtual non-existence. As the region's three-decade long conflict went into abeyance and the daily death tally dropped, the vagaries of the region's little-understood, political tensions were assigned to little-read columns hidden…

For-profit colleges have long been a feature of the American higher education landscape and the quality of the education they provide has always been under question. This paper investigates the effects of attending a for-profit college on voting and volunteering as compared to individuals who attended a not-for-profit college or no college at all.…

Tuition levels in the US have been rising at an above-the-inflation pace, leading to spiraling student debt levels and negative effects on students' well-being. While student outcomes of rising tuition are well known, the political reasons behind the decisions of policy makers to contain tuition increases or not remain poorly understood. In this…

Voting instruction typically provided to students is focused on educating for informed voting, but we believe it is essential that schools educate for informed and equitable voting. Indeed, in a well-functioning democratic society, participants need to be prepared to engage in critical, but civil, discourse with and about people who look and think…

Voting for various pro-environmental governmental policies is an indirect, but potentially effective, action that citizens can take to reduce global warming (GW) and climate change. Supporting further environmental education is an additional action. This study reports students' beliefs about the effectiveness of these indirect actions in reducing…

The college-educated are more likely to vote than are those with less education. Prior research suggests that the effect of college attendance on voting operates directly, by increasing an individual's interest and engagement in politics through social networks or human capital accumulation. College may also increase voting indirectly by leading…

In the 1960s, people across the West started imagining that they were in a societal transition. Crucially, in these future-oriented discussions, social class was often transformed into educational attainment as the main dividing line. These future studies garnered attention across the political spectrum, including the Swedish Conservative Party.…

Since the 1970s, the incarcerated population in the United States has grown exponentially. The country currently has the highest incarceration rate in the world and disproportionately incarcerates members of marginalized communities despite the known negative impacts on life chances and prosocial behavior. Because of these established…

Media reports suggest that parent frustration with COVID school policies and the growing politicization of education have increased community engagement with local public schools. However, there is no evidence to date on whether these factors have translated into greater engagement at the ballot box. This paper uses a novel data set to explore how…

Over the last decade in the context of collapsing trust in major public and private institutions, Chilean society has engaged in massive social mobilizations culminating in 2019 with widespread rioting in rebellion against the neoliberal model. This socio-political crisis raises the general question which this article addresses: How does such a…

A primary rationale for public provision of K-12 education and state financing of school spending is that education fosters civic engagement and the development of social capital. However, limited evidence exists on whether and how school spending affects civic engagement. Virtually all studies focus on the impact of educational attainment (as…

This paper describes the development and execution of an exhibition in an academic museum setting. The exhibition is presented as a self-directed learning intervention. The development process included conceptual development, the selection of exhibition materials, the creation of didactic written materials, spatial arrangement of the materials,…

Using clickers in the statistics classroom can help students identify and understand common errors and misconceptions through a combination of surprise and discussion. Students are presented with multiple-choice questions that they discuss with each other and then vote on; a class-wide discussion follows. Questions for which many students vote for…

In 2020, the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission (WSCC) strove "to educate the American people about the efforts and undertakings of the women's suffrage movement in the United States in a nonpartisan fashion." The occasion was the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment--Women's Suffrage Rights to the U.S. Constitution. This article…