Scholarly Research on Rising Tuition

This post is the 2nd in a series of posts that will target research on rising tuition costs (see Search Engine Search: Rising Tuition) for a Digital Citizenship class at CSU Channel Islands (CSUCI). This week, rather than using the basic search engines such as Google and Yahoo, I explored Google Scholar and the databases of the CSUCI library. I didn’t initially expect to find many differences in the results that I gathered from the two different mediums, but was pleasantly surprised.

It appears that the results from Google Scholar were more informational than theoretical. The articles that I found addressed a lot of facts: trends over the past X amount of years, effect on enrollment on a year to year basis, etc. By searching the databases however, I found more articles that examined, truly questioned, and offered tentative explanations and solutions to combat the problem. In psychology, we would denote differences such as these as similar to the differences between basic and applied research,

In hindsight, I should have realized that there is a reason that you must be given access to scholarly databases. The information that anyone can find on the internet does not include some of the best information out there: the research and analysis from experts in the field. For the average person looking for information on rising tuition, I think that Google Scholar is a valid resource for identifying the scope of the problem, but that searching academic databases would ultimately be better for identifying and analyzing the root of the problem. If I didn’t identify with this problem so personally, I might be satisfied with the numbers and facts. As a college student myself, I’m much more interested in finding information and prominent figures that seek with purpose to change the narrative.

Until next time,

MGH

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