This book assembles over 50 papers from the 7th Triennial European Research Conference of the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA), which was held from the 4th to the 7th of September 2013 at Humboldt-University in Berlin. The title of the conference was "Changing Configurations of Adult Education in Transitional…

Community colleges enroll nearly half of the students enrolled in public undergraduate programs and a disproportionate number of first-generation, low-income, underprepared and minority students. The new national completion agenda has brought both visibility and pressure to these open-access institutions, which have completion rates of less than…

A total of 11,447 high school students were surveyed to test the relation between victimization and the educational outcomes of truancy, post-high school intentions, and grades for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) and non-LGBTQ students. LGBTQ students reported statistically higher truancy, lower grades, greater…

A 2010 paper published in "Higher Education" investigated the relationship between South African Grade 12 students' programme preferences in 2001 for study in higher education, student enrolment in higher education programmes in 2002, and student graduations in 2006, devising what the author dubbed a preference-enrolment-graduation…

The Student Engagement Instrument (SEI) is a self-report measure of cognitive and affective engagement with school. Prior SEI validation studies have focused primarily on construct validity through analyses of internal consistency, factor analysis, and measurement invariance. Results are presented here from a two-pronged study of the criterion…

Background: Many programs emphasize subsequent pregnancy prevention and high school graduation among teenage mothers; however, less is known about their ability to increase financial earnings from employment opportunities while concurrently enrolled in school. This study evaluates factors influencing employment status among teenage mothers after…

This paper documents substantial differences across states in their higher education (HE) structures and highlights several empirical relationships between these structures and individuals' HE outcomes. Not surprisingly, individuals who are exposed to more-fractionalized HE structures are more likely to attend small public universities and…

Roughly half of all undergraduate students in the United States fail to persist to degree completion (American College Testing [ACT], 2010; Tinto, 1993; U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2013). Adult students often have higher levels of attrition than traditional-age students (Justice & Dornan, 2001;…

In 2011, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported that, in the 24 to 54 age range, the United States ranked thirty-fourth among all for individuals with a postsecondary credential. For the United States to increase in rank, adult students, who are projected to increase by 1.9 million in postsecondary enrollment by…

Using data from the National Longitudinal Transition Study-2, this study considers (a) the extent to which the socioeconomic status (SES) of youth with disabilities predicted their likelihood of high school graduation, postsecondary education enrollment, and employment; (b) the extent to which other individual and family factors mediated the…

Research examining diversifying college enrollment patterns has gradually gained attention in recent years. Yet, few studies have focused on postsecondary co-enrollment and its different forms such as co-enrolling at institutions of the same level (lateral co-enrollment) and attending a 4- and 2-year institution simultaneously (vertical…

In educational research and policy circles, college and career readiness is generating great interest. States are adopting various policy initiatives, such as rigorous curricular requirements, to increase students' preparedness for life after high school. Implicit in many of these initiatives is the idea that college readiness and career…

Cross-border student migration has significant implications for host communities in terms of academic, financial and social consequences. In light of Hong Kong's thirst for human resources, this paper reports on a study that interpreted the graduation plans of a group of "elite" mainland Chinese undergraduates in a publicly funded…

Based on a survey of 264 human resources professionals from 10 Society for Human Resource Management chapters in Texas, the authors investigated how human resources professionals accept online degrees compared to degrees based on face-to-face coursework for hiring and promotion purposes. If respondents were satisfied with their own online course…

In 2009, President Barack Obama set forth a goal that America would have the highest percentage of college graduates (associate's and bachelor's degree recipients) in the world by 2020. The U.S. Department of Education estimated that to reach this goal, the number of college graduates would need to increase by 50 percent nationwide by…