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Doctoral Dissertation Defense
of
Joseph James Kratky

For the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy
Research, Measurement and Statistics

The Higher Education Reservations Scale: Development, Refinement, and Exploratory Application

February 20, 2026
10:30 a.m.

The Higher Education Reservations Scale: Development, Refinement, and Exploratory Application

The societal role of higher education is coming under increased scrutiny. Ever-increasing tuition rates, reports of falling return-on-investment, and accusations of brainwashing seem to be perpetual news stories despite full-throated refutations of these claims. Research involving college students tends to be focused on university climate studies. While other reporting pulls from large swathes of the electorate. This study seeks to design a psychometric measure for assessing college students’ attitudes towards their college experience.

The purpose of this study is to (1) design a measure of higher education reservations, (2) refine the measure through multiple measurement analysis technique (i.e., Factor Analysis, Internal Consistency Reliability, Correlation Analysis, Rasch Analysis), and (3) apply the scale factors as the consequent of Conditional Process Models with students’ perceived political ideology as the primary antecedent. Students’ alignment with their parents’ politics and their self-professed engagement with political news act as a mediator and moderator respectively in the models.

(1, 2) The results provide strong psychometric validity evidence (i.e., construct, concurrent, internal consistency reliability) for a three-factor structure of higher education reservations. Rasch analysis suggested and subsequently endorsed a five-category response structure to factor items was preferable to a seven-category response structure. (3) Conditional Process Models did not support the hypothesized effects but revealed multiple potential future research directions.