Predictors of Departmental Quality in Regional Colleges and Universities. ASHE 1984 Annual Meeting Paper / Clifton F. Conrad and Robert T. Blackburn.

Correlates of departmental quality at the masters and doctoral level in regional colleges and universities were studied. The sample of 45 departments represented 14 public institutions in two states and included departments of biology, chemistry, education, history, and mathematics. Based on multivariate linear regression, departmental quality was shown to have small to moderate correlation with 32 variables related to faculty, students, program, and facilities. Many of these variables remained important when other variables were held constant. Moreover, combined measures for faculty (scholarly productivity, age and tenure status, geographical origin of highest degree, and teaching workload), students (number and ability), and program (proportion of institutional degree programs at the graduate level and curricular concentration) were found to explain moderate amounts of variation in departmental quality. While some of the correlates identified support previous research, the findings suggest that the factors associated with graduate departmental quality in regional colleges and universities are more multidimensional than in highly ranked programs in the nation's leading research universities. (Author/SW)

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