With funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Ford Foundation, she is currently a principal investigator of the California Benchmarking Project: Enhancing Institutional Effectiveness and Equity, a comprehensive study of transfer culture and practices, particularly as they impact community college students who begin postsecondary education in basic skills courses. She has previously served as principal investigator of two national projects evaluating institutional effectiveness and student outcomes in the areas of assessment and transfer access, where were funded by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, the Lumina Foundation for Education, and the Nellie Mae Education Foundation.

Dr. Dowd is the author of “From access to outcome equity: Revitalizing the democratic mission of the community college,” which appeared in 2003 in the Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science. Her research has also been published in Research in Higher Education, the Review of Higher Education, Urban Review, Education Policy Analysis Archives, the Community College Journal of Research and Practice, and the Handbook of Higher Education (in press).

She is the author and co-author of two monographs: Data Don’t Drive: Building a Practitioner-Driven Culture of Inquiry to Assess Community College Performance, which was issued as part of the Community College Student Success Project, and Transfer Access to Elite Colleges and Universities in the United States: Threading the Needle of the American Dream, a report of the Study of Economic, Informational, and Cultural Barriers to Community College Student Transfer Enrollment at Selective Institutions.

Dowd is also a faculty associate of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute (CHERI) and the Institute for Community College Development at Cornell University and has been a Visiting Fellow (2005-2006) of the New England Resource Center for Higher Education (NERCHE) at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she was a member of the higher education faculty from 2000 to 2006. Dr. Dowd serves on the editorial board of the Review of Higher Education. She is an active member of national scholarly associations, such as the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the Association for Institutional Research (AIR), and the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE). She was honored to be selected as a rising scholar to participate in the Kellogg Symposium on Higher Education for the Public Good (at the University of Michigan in 2004 and at the University of California at Los Angeles in 2002) and in the Higher Education Finance Roundtable of the University of Houston in 2002.

From 1987 to 1998, Dr. Dowd was marketing manager of the Cornell University School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions. After earning her doctorate, she coordinated the creation of the Institute for Community College Development (ICCD) at Cornell University, a leadership development initiative of the organization of New York State community college presidents and of the State University of New York system. In that capacity, she worked with the Board to define the ICCD’s mission and goals and organized national leadership development conferences for community college administrators.

Dr. Dowd was awarded the Ph.D. in 1998 from Cornell University, where her fields of study included social foundations of education, educational administration, labor economics, and curriculum. She was awarded the Master of Science degree in the field of education in 1997 and the Bachelor of Arts degree with distinction in all subjects, also from Cornell University, where she majored in English literature as an undergraduate.

http://www.usc.edu/dept/education/CUE/people/alicia.htm