PhD Leadership Studies
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Browsing PhD Leadership Studies by Subject "Educational Leadership"
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Item Marginalizing the Majority: Barriers to California Baccalaureate Attainment(2022-08) Quintanar, Brittnee A.California is home to the nation’s largest higher education systems which once served as the model for access, affordability, and excellence. However, decades of declining state investment and existing policies are marginalizing the majority of California students and perpetuating social stratification across the state. Without policy transformation, California will fail to meet demands for a more highly educated workforce. Higher education CEOs hold a unique vantage point in which they bridge and buffer micro, meso, and macro forces, and are positioned to provide nuanced insight into higher education’s complex ecosystem. This qualitative grounded theory study evaluated how California public higher education CEOs (UC n = 11, CSU n = 8, CCC n = 28) understand and navigate the challenges of increasing undergraduate access and attainment. Saturation of data reveals three broad themes - systemic barriers, institutional practices, and societal determinants - each with several subthemes. From business operations to curricular decisions, findings reveal a tension and inverse relationship amongst two continuums: uniformity and autonomy. Recent legislative reforms and higher education budget performance expectations propagate increasing intra and intersegmental uniformity, addressing participant concerns over disparate and circuitous pathways. However, participants caution against one-size-fits-all legislative approaches as each campus serves unique regional industry and student needs. Therefore, regional needs should moderate identification of the “sweet spot,” the point at which autonomy and uniformity continuums converge. California public higher education CEOs must balance the autonomy and uniformity continuums as they attempt to move their respective campus mission and strategic goals forward.Item Wisdom and Leadership: An Exploratory Study on Accelerating the Cultivation of Wisdom(2023-04) Gonzalez, NoraWisdom and leadership should go hand in hand. Both are concerned with human flourishing. Leadership is about making the right things happen the right way for the good of the collective.Discerning and doing the right things ultimately requires wisdom. While wisdom is esteemed as the highest intellectual and moral virtue, few studies explore the relationship between wisdom and leadership, especially how leaders understand and acquire wisdom. The three guiding questions for this study were: 1. Would higher education leaders who participate in a wisdom educational intervention experience an increase in their self-reported wisdom scores? 2. Do years of leadership experience moderate leaders’ self-reported wisdom scores? and 3. Do faith, gender, years of leadership experience, and specialty/career field affect self-reported wisdom scores? A pretest-posttest control-group design was utilized using Ardelt’s abbreviated Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale (3D-WS-12). This study explored the nature of wisdom, whether leaders could accelerate their acquisition of wisdom by reading a synthesis of wisdom, and leaders’ reading habits. Leaders in four-year universities across the United States were randomly assigned to two groups. They completed the abbreviated 3D-WS-12 before and after the experimental group read a primer on wisdom. The study did not find statistical significance for its three hypotheses. However, participants’ answers to the open-ended questions revealed they found the intervention helpful in acquiring and practicing wisdom; most acknowledged that they did not engage in much outside reading. Results indicate additional research is needed to explore the relationship between wisdom and leadership and how leaders can cultivate wisdom.