Divergent genetic strata in five Bahamian islands

Based on historical records, the genetic landscape of the Bahamian archipelago is presumed to be complex and to exhibit island-specific characteristics, yet the genetic composition of the island chain, which could corroborate or refute these past accounts, remains poorly defined. As such, the current investigation was undertaken to genetically characterize 5 Bahamian populations representing the Northwest (Grand Bahama and Abaco) and Central (Eleuthera, Exuma and Long Island) Bahamas across the 15 autosomal Identifiler loci routinely employed in forensic analyses. Altogether, our findings suggest that Bahamians are a genetically heterogeneous group, with each island sampled receiving differential contributions from African, European, East Asian and Native American sources. Even though the strongest genetic signal in all 5 collections emanates from continental Africa, inter-island differentiation is noted in both the Structure and admixture analyses. The presence of alleles not in common among the 5 insular populations also signals genetic heterogeneity among the islands of the archipelago. This is especially the case when considering the Long Island population, which exhibits statistically significant genetic differences in relation to the other Bahamian collections and the New World groups of African descent (Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean) in the G-test pair-wise comparisons, even after application of the Bonferroni adjustment.     

Accountability in Australian Government: Towards the Year 2000

This symposium is based on a workshop held at the Australian National University on 27 March 1998, sponsored by the Australia Institute, the Centre for Australian Public Centre Management at Griffith University and the Institute of Public Administration, Australia. The Political Science Program, within the Research School of Social Sciences, at the ANU provided a congenial environment for the workshop. Marian Simms is grateful to Barry Hindess for his ongoing support for the 'Accountability in Australian Government' project. More particularly Christel Cools, Louise Sims and Wayne Naughton provided technical back-up. Peter McCarthy assisted with library research. Dhammika Dharmapala made useful comments on the final version.     

Increasing Community College Completion Rates Among Low-Income Students: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial Evaluation of a Case-Management Intervention

Community college completion rates are low, especially among low-income students. The existing policy and research attention has primarily focused on academic and financial challenges, but there is ample reason to think that non-academic obstacles might be key drivers of dropout rates for low-income students. This study focuses on the role of “life barriers” and investigates the effectiveness of intensive case-management services for low-income community college students. We evaluate the impact of the Stay the Course (STC) intensive case-management program through a multi-armed randomized controlled trial evaluation conducted between 2013 and 2016 in Fort Worth, Texas. Analysis of administrative records indicates that STC significantly increased persistence and degree completion for women; estimates for the full sample are imprecise. The statistically significant estimates for women imply that STC tripled associate's degree receipt by 31.5 percentage points. We find no difference in outcomes between students in an emergency financial assistance (EFA) only treatment arm and the control group. Given program costs of $4,343 per person, the implied cost per additional associate's degree is $27,140. This study complements existing literature on financial and informational interventions designed to increase completion rates and is most closely related to the smaller literature examining coaching and mentoring interventions.