Yeritsyan, Anna (2023-08). Developing Agricultural Sector: From Quality of Agricultural Education to Evaluation of Policies Enhancing Agricultural Value Chains. Doctoral Dissertation.
Thesis
Agriculture may not be a field that young people perceive as "fashionable" and find attractive as a future specialization. The importance of equipping world economies with food production specialists, however, cannot be overstated. Similarly, it is crucial to put together the right policies to ensure enabling environment for these specialists to work and supply the global population with food. To address these issues, the overall objective of this dissertation is enhancing agricultural value chains through revealing factors affecting quality of agricultural education and highlighting gaps in policies that if addressed may increase the impact of interventions at different stages of agricultural value chains. The first two essays of this dissertation use mixed effect hierarchical models and utilize data from Texas A&M University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (COALS) to discuss the importance of universities' grading standards and to reveal factors affecting the quality of education. The third essay examines knowledge gaps relating to the policies aimed at agricultural value chains development through application of the Evidence Gap Map (EGM) method. First essay discusses the notion of grade inflation and examines factors that may impact grades. The main finding is systematic increase in grades from 1985 to 2019 after controlling for the influence of institution, instructors, and student factors. This finding suggests that grading may not be an accurate signal for evaluating quality of education. The second essay reveals differences in grading patterns among departments in COALS and even within the same department between time periods. It appears differences in grades are mainly driven by specifics of each department. Because of these differences, it is important to exercise caution when comparing students and their grades across different majors, as this can lead to misleading conclusions for employers and graduate school recruiters. In the third essay, policies that may impact agricultural productivity, market access, and farmers' welfare are identified. Based on the data from one hundred ninety-three studies, most frequently occurring policy interventions are related to input supply stage. The least frequently occurring interventions are related to governance along Agricultural Value Chains (AVC) and interventions targeted toward gender, poverty, and social issues.
