Michael J. Dooris, Ph.D.
An active affiliate faculty member, Dr. Dooris has been at Penn State since 1981 and has served in several areas, including the University Budget Office and academic affairs. Earlier professional experience included positions as statistician at the U.S. Census Bureau and management consultant at Arthur Andersen & Co. Administratively, Dr. Dooris provides research support to the Office of the Provost for university-level planning, assessment, and continuous quality improvement. His publications have received awards from the Society for College and University Planning and the journal Planning for Higher Education. Dr. Dooris was a CIC Academic Leadership Fellow in 1997-98. He holds a bachelor's degree in economics and a doctorate in higher education from Penn State, and an MBA from the University of Rhode Island.
Donald E. Heller, Ph.D.
Dr. Heller came to Penn State from the University of Michigan, where he earned a national reputation for his studies of higher education finance, tuition pricing, financial aid, and student access. Prior to his academic career, he served as an information technology manager at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for more than ten years. His main areas of expertise include higher education economics, public policy, and finance, as well as academic and administrative uses of technology in higher education. In addition, Dr. Heller focuses on issues of access and choice in postsecondary education, examining the factors and policies that help to determine whether or not people attend college, and what type of institution they attend.
Dr. Heller devotes much of his work to informing higher education policy organizations, state governing boards, legislative agencies, and the public about postsecondary education policy issues. He has consulted on higher education policy issues for university systems and policy-making organizations in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Tennessee. He has testified before the U.S. House of Representatives and state legislatures, and has been interviewed at numerous media events. Dr. Heller earned a doctorate in higher education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; he holds a master's degree in administration, planning, and social policy from Harvard and a bachelor's degree in economics and political science from Tufts University.
Dr. Heller's research has been published in The Journal of Higher Education, The Review of Higher Education, and the Journal of Student Financial Aid. Dr. Heller is the editor of Condition of Access: Higher Education for Lower Income Students (Praeger Publishers, 2002) and The States and Public Higher Education Policy: Affordability, Access, and Accountability (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). In 2001 he received the Robert P. Huff Golden Quill Award from the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators for his contributions to the literature on student financial aid. In 2002 he received the Promising Scholar/Early Career Award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education.
Robert Reason, Ph.D.
In 2003, following a postdoctoral research fellowship at Iowa State University, Dr. Reason came to Penn State, where he is an assistant professor in the Higher Education Program and the professor-in-charge of the M.Ed. program in college student affairs. Dr. Reason has taught in higher education/student affairs programs at Iowa State University and Western Illinois University. His experience includes courses related to student development in college, counseling for college student affairs professionals, and students in American higher education.
Dr. Reason's research areas include student development in college environments, specifically related to the development of multicultural competence. As the senior student affairs officer, Dr. Reason has also studied and written on topics of salary and representational equity. He has been honored with the Emerging Scholar and Annuit Coeptis awards from the American College Personnel Association, and with Iowa State University's Research Excellence Award.
Dr. Reason earned his doctorate in education at Iowa State University, his master's degree in counseling and student personnel at Mankato State University, and his bachelor's degree in economics at Grinnell College. Prior to his doctoral studies, he gained seven years of student affairs practitioner experience, primarily in residence life.
Linda C. Strauss, Ph.D.
Dr. Strauss has more than ten years of experience as an administrator and researcher in higher education. She has served as director of the Equal Opportunity Program and the summer Learning Edge Academic Program. In 1998 she was selected to serve for a year as an Administrative Fellow to work with Penn State's senior vice president for finance and business/treasurer. Dr. Strauss has published on a wide array of topics, ranging from the impact of institutional and student characteristics on student outcomes to racial identity development. She has co-authored several book chapters and has published in Research in Higher Education and The Journal of Higher Education. Her current research interests include athletic administration, institutional research, racial identity development, and engineering accreditation. Most recently, Dr. Strauss served as an institutional research consultant to the Office of Undergraduate Education at Penn State, and she teaches a course on research and assessment in student affairs for the graduate program in higher education.
Patrick T. Terenzini, Ph.D.
Dr. Terenzini is Distinguished Professor of Education and senior scientist in the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Penn State. He is co-author (with Ernest T. Pascarella) of How College Affects Students (Jossey-Bass, 1991), an award-winning synthesis of twenty years of research on the impacts of the college experience on students, recently selected as "one of the 100 most important and influential books about US colleges and universities published in the 20th century." The second volume of this review was published in early 2005. Dr. Terenzini has also published more than 100 articles in refereed journals and made more than 150 presentations at scholarly and professional conferences.
Dr. Terenzini's research examines the effects of college on student learning and development; persistence and educational attainment; and the college experience and outcomes for low-income and first-generation students. Dr. Terenzini is a former editor-in-chief of New Directions for Institutional Research, an associate editor of Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, and editorial board member for The Review of Higher Education.
Dr. Terenzini has been a consulting editor for Research in Higher Education for more than twenty years. He has received the research awards of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, the Association for Institutional Research, the American College Personnel Association, the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, and the student personnel associations of New York and Pennsylvania. He is a three-time winner of the Forum Best Paper Award from the Association for Institutional Research. Most recently, Dr. Terenzini (with A. F. Cabrera, C. L. Colbeck, J. M. Parente, and S. A. Bjorklund) received the William Elgin Wickenden Award from the American Society for Engineering Education for the best paper published in the Journal of Engineering Education in 2001. He is also a past president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education.
In Dr. Terenzini's more than twenty-five years of experience in higher education, he has been a teacher, researcher, and administrator. Dr. Terenzini holds a bachelor's degree in English from Dartmouth College, a master's degree in English education from Harvard University, and a doctorate in higher education from Syracuse University. Before coming to Penn State, he held administrative and/or teaching positions at Dean College (Massachusetts), Syracuse University, SUNY Albany, and the University of Georgia.
J. Fredericks Volkwein, Ph.D.
Dr. Volkwein has had a forty-year career as a researcher, administrator, and faculty member. After receiving a bachelor's degree from Pomona College and a doctorate from Cornell University, he held a variety of administrative posts, first at SUNY Binghamton and then for thirty years at SUNY Albany, where he was director of institutional research and a faculty member in the Department of Educational Administration and Policy Studies. At Penn State he is a professor and senior scientist in the Department of Education Policy Studies. His teaching and research interests span the areas of academic program evaluation and accreditation, assessment of student learning and growth, state regulation and performance indicators, campus culture and climate, and administrative satisfaction and decision support. All his scholarly work is related, directly or indirectly, to the topic of organizational effectiveness.
Dr. Volkwein has produced more than 100 journal articles, research reports, conference papers, and book chapters. He is currently the principal investigator or co-principal investigator on projects in the areas of accreditation, engineering education, and training of institutional researchers. He also serves as editor-in-chief for the Jossey-Bass series New Directions for Institutional Research and is a consulting editor for three other higher education journals. A recent winner of the Association for Institutional Research's AIR Suslow Award for distinguished scholarship, he has served as president of the North East Association for Institutional Research and received its Distinguished Service Award. Dr. Volkwein chaired the Middle States committee that produced the monograph Framework for Outcomes Assessment.
M. Lee Upcraft, Ph.D.
Dr. Upcraft holds a doctorate in student personnel administration from Michigan State University. He served in various administrative positions in student affairs until his retirement as assistant vice president emeritus for student affairs and affiliate professor emeritus of higher education at Penn State. His research interests include residence halls, student retention, the transition to college, student affairs management, minority-majority relations, and assessment. His most recent book—Assessment Practice in Student Affairs, edited with John Schuh and associates—
