ITHACA, N.Y. -- The 2005 conference of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute (CHERI) will take place Sunday and Monday, May 22 and 23, on the Cornell University campus. Its title and theme is "Assessing Public Higher Education at the Start of the 21st Century." 

The presentations are free and open to the public. Participants include faculty and administrators from universities and state systems and education-policy experts from the National Research Council and the Institute for Higher Education Policy. 

Among the papers to be presented are one on why state aid to educational institutions has been declining; and one by CHERI Director Ronald Ehrenberg, the Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics at Cornell, and Cornell graduate student Liang Zhang on whether increased use of graduate students as instructors influences undergraduate students' persistence, graduation rates and propensity to go on to advanced studies. 

Other papers will look at how the changing finances of public higher education have affected the institutions they support. John Wiley, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the keynote speaker at a May 22 evening dinner. For more information contact Darrlyn O'Connell at dss7@cornell.edu or visit this Web site: http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/cheri.