A Mandate for Causal Inference in Higher Ed

 See also:  Using SAS® Enterprise BI and SAS® Enterprise Miner™ to
Reduce Student Attrition & Propensity Score Matching in Higher Education Research

From an older article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

 "The new policy will permit -- but not require-- all of the department's units to give preference to grant applicants who promise to use randomized controlled trials or similar quasi experimental
methods."

Complaints From Researchers:

"They argued that randomized trials were expensive and difficult to conduct on a meaningful scale... posed ethical problems"

Well that sounds exactly like a scenario for quasi-experimental methods and causal inference!

Source:
New Federal Policy Favors Randomized Trials in
Education Research
By DAVID GLENN
March 11, 2005