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Office of Higher Education Research

Our Mission

The Office of Higher Education Research advances scholarship that strengthens higher education through data-driven insights, practice-oriented preparation, and transformative strategies that foster individual, institutional, and societal growth within and beyond the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

Our Team

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Our Research

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OHER Highlights

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Read the Latest OHER Highlight

OHER  Highlight: OHER partners with College of Education and UK Office of Student Success

What helps today's undergraduate students to succeed in college? What is on their minds? On September 23, 2026, OHER partnered with UK's College of Education and Office of Student Success to bring together faculty and staff from across the disciplines for conversation, community, and knowledge-sharing around the topic of understanding today's college student. More than 35 units were represented as we explored national and institutional data about student mental health and wellbeing, concerns and ideas around artificial intelligence, current and future financial wellness, intellectual growth and learning needs, belonging and community, and much more. Thank you to everyone who attended and stay tuned for future events on campus as we Advance Kentucky Together. 

 

Our Team

  • Dr. Meghan J. Pifer (Director and Research Associate) is Professor and Chair of the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Kentucky. At UK, she oversees the PIFER Lab (Professional & Institutional Contexts of Faculty Experiences & Careers Research lab). She earned a PhD in Higher Education from the Pennsylvania State University, a master’s in Higher Education Administration from Boston University, and a bachelor’s in Philosophy and Literature from the University of Pittsburgh. Pifer studies individual experiences in institutional contexts of higher education and related outcomes for individuals, institutions, and society. Pifer is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Higher Education and the Review of Higher Education.
  • Dr. Kayla M. Johnson (Associate Director and Research Associate) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation at the University of Kentucky. She holds a dual-title PhD in Higher Education and Comparative and International Education from the Pennsylvania State University, an MS in Higher Education from UK, and BAs in English, French, and Secondary Education from Marshall University. She is Director of the JOHNson Lab (Journeys and Opportunities in Higher and iNternational education), which advances understanding in comparative, international, and higher education via inclusive and globally engaged research on study abroad programming, student experiences, and culturally-grounded curriculum development. Dr. Johnson is Deputy Editor of the American Journal of Education and is a member of the editorial board of the Review of Educational Research. 
  • Dr. Neal Hutchens (Research Associate) is a University Research Professor at the University of Kentucky, where he is a faculty member in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation. His research centers on topics dealing with the intersections of higher education law, policy and practice, with much of his scholarship centered on issues of free speech and academic freedom. Hutchens is a past winner of the William A. Kaplin Award from the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University College of Law, an award designated to recognize nationally leading scholars at the intersection of higher education law and policy. He has published widely on law, policy, and practice issues in higher education. Among his publications, he is on the author team for The Law of Higher Education: Essentials for Legal and Administrative Practice, a leading legal treatise on higher education law. Alongside his academic writings, he has written for publications that include The Conversation, The Hechinger Report, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Ed. He is regularly asked by reporters to comment on news stories involving legal issues in higher education, including by The New York Times, USA Today, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Ed. Hutchens earned his Ph.D. in education policy from the University of Maryland and his J.D. from the University of Alabama School of Law. 
  • Dr. Jungmin Lee (Research Associate) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation at the University of Kentucky. She earned a Ph.D. in Leadership and Policy Studies from Vanderbilt University. Before Vanderbilt, she earned a bachelor's and a master's degree in education from Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea. She is interested in 1) whether/how students and organizations respond to educational policies and 2) student outcomes associated with educational policies and practices. Her recent research focuses on dual enrollment/credit, transfer students, and community college. She currently leads a state-funded research project on why community college graduates do not transfer. 
  • Dr. Ty C. McNamee (Research Associate) is an Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation at the University of Kentucky. He earned a EdD in Higher and Postsecondary Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, a master’s in Higher Education and Students Affairs from the University of Connecticut, and a bachelor’s in English from the University of Wyoming. Ty conducts research on higher education access, success, and equity for rural students, particularly those from poor and working-class backgrounds and those who are queer, as well as college teaching and learning and faculty development at rural postsecondary institutions. Ty’s doctoral dissertation, The Cultural Transition Into and Navigation of Higher Education for Rural Students from Poor and Working-class Backgrounds, won the 2023-2024 American Educational Research Association (AERA) Division J Dissertation of the Year. He currently serves as a Co-PI and Research Fellow for the multi-million-dollar Rural Talent Development and Attraction Lab based out of the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges (ARRC).

 

Our Research

2026

  • Cain, L. K., McNamee, T. C., & Means, D. R. (2025-2026). Queering rural education. Dual Issue: Journal of Research in Rural Education and Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education. 
  • Johnson, K. M. (2026). Navigating cultural incongruence: Asset-based strategies to foster intercultural competence among marginalized students abroad. EAIE. Glasgow, Scotland. 
  • Johnson, K. M. (2026). Navigating cultural incongruence: Asset-oriented considerations for developing intercultural competence in education abroad with marginalized students. In G. Letendre, A. Ogden, & C. Wynne (Eds.), Preparing students for a global world: Intersectional and intercultural competence for school leaders. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 
  • Johnson, K. M., & Farley, S. (2026). Navigating cultural incongruence: Asset-oriented considerations for developing intercultural competence in education abroad with marginalized students. CIES. San Francisco, CA. 
  • Johnson, K. M., & Wilson Tortolano, A-M. (2026). Design thinking for reciprocal community development in global learning programs. World Community Development Conference. Glasgow, Scotland. 
  • Levitan, J., Johnson, K. M., Perez, J., & Velasquez, A. (2026). School leadership and community voice in educational decision-making: A descriptive overview and capacity building framework. In J. Weinstein Cayuela, G. Muñoz Stuardo, & J. Flessa (Eds.), School leadership in Latin America: Evidence, analysis, and implications for education policy. Springer. 
  • Logsdon, M. C., Das, K., & Pifer, M. J. (2026). Motivating and Enabling Mid-Career Scholars: Two Case Studies in Research Development. Research Development Review: The NORDP Journal. 
  • McNamee, T. C., Islem, S. & Van Horn, A. D. (2026). Measuring and defining rurality: Implications for higher education research on rural postsecondary issues. In L. Perna & N. Hillman (Eds.), Higher education: Handbook of theory and research. Springer. 
  • Riffe, K. A., & Pifer, M. J. (2026). Academic departments as microfoundations of institutional governance. New Directions for Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1002/he.70014 

2025

  • Buckley, J. B., Pifer, M. J., & Duffy, C. (2025). “The beginning of everything:” Broadening the scope of military transitions in higher education. The Journal of The First-Year Experience & Students in Transition, 37(1), 71-87. 
  • Gorski-Steiner, I., Manni, K., Johnson, K. M., & Mehta, K. (2025). Designing reciprocal short-term activities abroad. Higher Education Studies, 15(3), 90-100. 
  • Johnson, K. M. (2025). Destination: Wokeness? Possibilities of domestic educational travel as conscientizing praxis. Education, Citizenship, and Social Justice, 20(1), 55-76.
  • Johnson, K. M., & Levitan, J. (2025, online first). Rural Indigenous students’ pathways to and through Peruvian institutos: An ecological systems analysis. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education.
  • Kim, J., Lee, J., Rodriguez, S., Yoon, S. W. (2025). Exploring the impact of collegiate experiences on academic success and retention for non-traditional students at community colleges: A machine learning approach. New Directions for Community Colleges, 212, 49-60.
  • Lee, J. (2025). Can we fill the seats next year?: Challenges facing two-year colleges in South Korea. In R. M. Helms & K. Bista (Eds.), Mapping Community Colleges Around the World: Comparative Perspectives and Collaborative Pathways, Vol. 1: Global Snapshots: Models, Missions, and Challenges, Vol. 1. (pp. 30-33). Association of Community College Trustees.
  • Lee, J., & Kolawole, O. (2025). What happened to community college student engagement after the pandemic? Poster presented at the American Educational Research Association.
  • Johnson, K. M., & Levitan, J. (2025). “Sus metas son mas grandes”: Peruvian parental perspectives on students’ goals, achievement, and well-being post-covid. CIES. Chicago, IL.
  • Lee. J., Kim, J., & Kolawole, O., & (2025). What happened to community college student engagement after the pandemic? New Directions for Community Colleges, 212, 13-24.
  • Lee, J., & Suh, H. (2025). Does financial aid help low-income students take dual enrollment courses? Innovative Higher Education, 50, 1227-1245.
  • Levitan, J., & Johnson, K. M. (2025). Can using Artificial Intelligence to create culturally grounded education remedy and repair epistemic injustice? AERA. Denver, CO. 
  • Levitan, J., Johnson, K. M., Velasquez, A., Perez, J., & Bello, S. (2025). Using community-based participatory action research to create culturally-grounded curriculum at-scale: A study of systems change in Peru. Educational Action Research.
  • McNamee, T. C. (2025). The cultural journeys of rural, poor and working-class college students: Policy and practice to support degree attainment. Routledge. 
  • McNamee, T. C., Ardoin, S., Cooper, N. D., & Sansone, V. A. (2025). “Because I’m from a rural background”: An examination of rural students in higher education through a critical, non-deficit framework. The Journal of Higher Education.
  • McNamee, T. C., Ardoin, S., & Islem, S. (2025). Fostering culturally engaging campus environments for rural, poor and working-class students in higher education. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education. 
  • Omotilewa, O., & Johnson, K. M. (2025). The (in)effect of Trump-era anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric on international student mobility in the US. Journal of Comparative and International Higher Education, 17(4), 63-76.
  • Pifer, M. J., Riffe, K. A., & Logsdon, M. C. (2025, April). Administrator and staff influences on faculty experiences and scholarly productivity. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Denver, CO. 
  • Pifer, M. J., Riffe, K. A., & Logsdon, M. C. (2025, November). The underexplored role of staff and administrators in advancing faculty scholarship. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, Denver, CO. 
  • Ro, H., & Lee, J. (2025). Faculty Salary Inequality in Texas: The Role of Academic Inbreeding or Homegrown Faculty. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association.
  • Yang, J., Islem, S., & McNamee, T. C. (2025). Rural students’ sense of belonging: The influence of academic campus climate. New Directions in Higher Education. 

^, Student co-author

 

OHER Highlight

McNamee and colleagues publish Measuring and Defining Rurality: Implications for Higher Education Research on Rural Postsecondary Issues in Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research

 

Q: Share a little bit about the why behind this research. What did you set out to learn or share?  

A: In recent years, "rurality" — that is hailing from and/or residing in a rural area — has become a larger part of higher education access and success conversations, especially given that rural students face some of the lowest college-going and completion rates in the country. Rural students, families, and communities hold a variety of rural-based strengths and capital that can help them in their educational trajectories. Yet, their postsecondary access and success rates remain comparatively low due to structural issues such as physical access to nearby colleges and universities, socioeconomic barriers in high-poverty rural spaces, and cultural, social, and academic challenges within rural locales and schools. As these conversations around rural student higher education access and success increased, we and other researchers in our circles kept hearing the same question in our publications and presentations — "but how do we define rurality?" This chapter addresses that question head-on. 

Q: What is one key takeaway from this scholarship?  

A: Our worry was that because postsecondary researchers, practitioners, and policymakers couldn't reach a consensus on how to define rurality, they would simply forego including rural populations in their college access and success work. This chapter showcases that rural America is integral to the economic and social functioning of the United States. Like other demographics and identities that are socially constructed, we should not exclude rurality from scholarship, practice, and policy. Doing so would marginalize the tens of millions of people who live in and/or are from rural communities. Our chapter, instead, offers a multitude of methods around how to actually define rurality — quantitatively, qualitatively, and/or via mixed methods — particularly related to rural students and their higher education access and success. 

Q: What is one thing you learned about studying higher education from this project?  

A: There is not one way to define rurality. Rurality itself remains complex and there are a diverse range of experiences and people making up rural America. This is representative of how it is difficult to define a variety of other social constructs in the U.S.; a spectrum of identities and experiences can exist within those categories. What is important for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to know and enact is: 1) including and defining rurality in their work using markers that point to rurality (e.g., low-populated towns spread across large areas of land, small tight-knit community networks, oftentimes a reliance on and/or connection to land and nature, etc.); 2) providing transparent justification for why and how they defined rurality in such a way; and 3) ensuring that through their definitions they are making space for a diversity of experiences and people within the rural areas they are working with. 

 

Ty McNamee
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