Ebby Luvaga (pictured right) is determined to know each of the 75 freshmen members of the agricultural business learning community. Each fall semester she starts with a blank book and adds a page dedicated to each student. There’s a freshman photo and general biographical information - and then there are the handwritten notes that Luvaga keeps on each student that, over time, fill in a more personal picture of the individual.

Luvaga, a senior lecturer and academic advisor in the Department of Economics, coordinates the learning community for freshmen who declare agricultural business as their major. She jokingly describes her role as a “mother away from home,” but her work is part of a broad and successful university-wide strategy designed to combat freshmen retention struggles.

College retention of freshmen is a growing problem in many colleges and universities around the nation. According to rankings compiled by U.S. News & World Report, as many as one in three students fail to return for their sophomore year. To combat this, ISU employed its learning community strategy in 1995, with an 85% freshman retention rate for the university overall for students to participate in a learning community. Students who participate in the ag business learning community have a 90% or higher retention rate.

The freshmen Luvaga meets in August are understandably nervous about their new life change. Many have come from small rural communities where the entire high school population was significantly smaller than some of the classes they’ll take at ISU. Her goal is to create the sense of a small community of people, which ultimately helps freshmen feel more at ease as they transition to college life. "ISU is a big campus,” she says. "A learning community is one way that we try to break it down and make it seem like a smaller place."

Connecting students in regular ways is part of the strategy. Students meet weekly in teams of 15-20 students where they receive guidance from older students called “peer mentors.” They also share similar core classes, tutoring services, and small group discussions led by faculty members. They might also take short field trips off campus, participate in intramural sports, and even engage in volunteer opportunities in the community. Helping students get to know and interact with faculty both in and out of the classroom is another key aspect of the program.

Peer mentors, says Luvaga, are a little like an additional set of "eyes and ears" that help her keep a pulse on the progress of each student, both "in good times and in bad." Freshman meet with them weekly in small teams where they learn about campus life, work on special projects, and share group activities.

"If someone is skipping class or really struggling, our peer mentors let me know. Then I can connect with the student directly to find out if there's a bigger issue," she says. "Each student is different, and I keep that in mind as I try to get to know them."

Tory Mogler (pictured right, facilitating a learning community activity), a sophomore peer mentor, remembers what it was like coming from a small Iowa town with only 52 seniors in his graduating class. "When I arrived at ISU, you could say I was a little overwhelmed. Being a part of the learning community helped it all feel more manageable," he says.

Casey Clemens, a junior, was part of the ag business learning community her freshmen year and is now serving her second year as a peer mentor. Today, she says the group she “bonded” with during her first days on campus are still “some of my closest friends.”

In 2009, Luvaga and the ag business learning community won a campus-wide award for the quality of their work with freshmen. Retention rates for freshmen have remained high, and she’s understandably pleased with their success. But the key, she says, is not only in creating a sense of belonging at ISU for students, but also making sure that they succeed in their academics.

"We strive to provide a warm environment, as well as many other opportunities to enrich our students’ academic experience at ISU,” says Luvaga.

To view a short YouTube video on learning communities at ISU, click on the image of Luvaga left.

Learn more about ISU's learning communities at: http://www.inside.iastate.edu/2011/0519/lc.php

“Increasing Returns, Patronage Payments and Cooperative Membership,” with Florentina Nicoleta Uzea, University of Saskatchewan. Wednesday, November 2, 4:10 PM to 5:30 PM, 368A Heady Hall.

Uzea holds a bachelor’s degree in agri-food economics from the Academy of Economic Studies (Romania), a master’s degree in business economics and management (with a focus on the agri-food sector) from the Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Chania (Greece), and a Ph.D. degree in agricultural economics from the University of Saskatchewan (Canada). Her scholarly interests range widely, but special areas of interests include: industrial organization, economics of cooperatives, agricultural marketing, behavioural economics, and genomics risk governance. In her Ph.D. dissertation, entitled "Co-operation and Coordination in the Co-operative Retailing System: Essays on Economic and Identity Strategies," she combined industrial organization and game theory concepts from economics, insights from social and cognitive psychology, and a business case study approach to shed light on some of the economic and behavioral strategies and mechanisms that federated cooperatives, in particular, and strategic alliances, in general, can use to address the opportunism and coordination problems that arise among their members. Uzea's thesis proposal was awarded the Alexander Fraser Laidlaw Fellowship by the Canadian Co-operative Association in 2008 and her thesis received the 2011 William Applebaum Memorial Scholarship Award for Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation in Food Distribution and Marketing from the Food Distribution Research Society (U.S.A.). While at the University of Saskatchewan, she has also been involved with VALGEN (Value Generation Through Genomics) – a Genome Canada research project aimed at identifying new models for governance of transformative agricultural technologies to ensure that publicly supported research does not stall in the regulatory process. As a member of the VALGEN team, she examined how behavioral factors come into play at the various stages of the risk analysis process and amplify the complexity of the risk analysis system related to genomics. Uzea has taught at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, in the areas of agricultural marketing, industrial organization of agricultural markets, and mathematics and statistics for economists.

Abstract: The need to acquire and maintain adequate equity capital to finance growth is a top challenge facing cooperatives. Cooperatives have limited access to outside sources of finance – i.e., equity markets – because of restrictions on residual claims. Moreover, cooperative members themselves lack incentives to invest in their organization’s growth because of free rider, horizon, and portfolio problems. These problems in raising capital mean that cooperatives have trouble making key investments and keeping member support. The result is a downward spiral of member support and investment. But not all cooperatives suffer this problem. A case in point is the Co-operative Retailing System in Western Canada, which has experienced strong growth in business and investment over the past 25 years. Instead of a viscous downward cycle, there is a virtuous upward spiral, which seems to be generated by both increasing returns in patronizing the cooperative and members’ confidence that their counterparts will choose to patronize their organization. This paper introduces increasing returns into a cooperative patronage model. The result is multiple equilibria – some of these equilibria are ones with high patronage and high investment, while others exhibit low patronage and low investment. The equilibrium that emerges depends on coordination of decisions, which depends on what people believe others will do. The implication of this result is that cooperatives and their members can benefit from communication, identity-building, and trust-creation activities that can serve as coordinating mechanisms.

"Optimal Monetary Policy with Informational Frictions," with Jennifer La'O, University of Chicago. Friday, November 4, 3:40 pm - 5:00 pm, 368A Heady Hall. 

Jennifer La’O conducts research in macroeconomics, theory, and finance. Her current research focuses on how informational and financial frictions affect the short-run fluctuations of the aggregate economy. In her current paper, "Collateral Constraints and Noisy Fluctuations," La'O explores how dispersed information and collateral constraints on firm-level investment lead to greater non-fundamental volatility in GDP and asset prices. Her most recent publication, "Noisy Business Cycles," appears in the NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2009. La’O earned her PhD in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2010. Prior to pursuing her PhD, in 2005 she received her bachelor's degree in economics also from MIT, with a minor in mathematics. La'O received an award for best paper in the MIT Undergraduate Economics Journal, and as a graduate student she was awarded the Ida M. Green fellowship. La’O joined Chicago Booth in 2010.

Abstract: We study optimal monetary policy in an environment in which firms’ pricing and production decisions are subject to informational frictions. Our framework accommodates multiple formalizations of these frictions, including dispersed private information, sticky information, and certain forms of inattention. An appropriate notion of constrained efficiency is analyzed alongside the Ramsey policy problem. Similar to the New-Keynesian paradigm, efficiency obtains with a subsidy that removes the monopoly distortion and a monetary policy that replicates flexible-price allocations. Nevertheless, “divine coincidence” breaks down and full price stability is no more optimal. Rather, the optimal policy is to “lean against the wind”, that is, to target a negative correlation between the price level and real economic activity.

The Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE – www.aere.org) and the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (EAERE – www.eaere.org), in cooperation with the East Asian Association of Environmental and Resource Economics (EAAERE - www.eaaere.org), solicit proposals for the Local Organising Committee and for the Venue for the 5th World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists, to be held in year 2014 tentatively between late June and early July.
Universities, research organisations, or groups of organisations, that intend to propose their candidature for the Local Organising Committee and Venue are kindly requested to send their expressions of interest to the Chair of the Selection Committee by 15 March 2012.

Deadline: Jan. 20, 2012; Grants up to $300,000; http://www.nifa.usda.gov/fo/secondaryeducationchallenge.cfm

The Secondary Education, Two-Year Postsecondary Education, and Agriculture in the K-12 Classroom Challenge Grants (SPECA) program seeks to: (a) promote and strengthen secondary education and two-year postsecondary education in agriscience and agribusiness in order to help ensure the existence in the United States of a qualified workforce to serve the food and agricultural sciences system; and (b) promote complementary and synergistic linkages among secondary, two-year postsecondary, and higher education programs in the food and agricultural sciences in order to advance excellence in education and encourage more young Americans to pursue and complete a baccalaureate or higher degree in the food and agricultural sciences.

Click on the following titles for further information:

Gardner Endowed Chair

Agribusiness Management

Assistant Professor Consumer Econ Finance

ACE Lecturer in Agribusiness