Many students do not receive the adequate academic and social support during their enrollment in a higher education institution that could positively impact their abilities to succeed in college (Astin, 1984; Hurtado & Carter, 1997; Nora, 1987; Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991). These support systems can be viewed as providing a holistic mentoring…

This article presents seven guidelines to direct professional practice aimed toward the improvement of institutional student retention rates. For each of the seven guidelines, specific recommendations to provide direction to the enactment of the focal guideline are described. These seven guidelines spring from empirical studies of campus-based…

Colleges are under mounting pressure to increase retention rates by easing incoming students' academic and social transition to college. Finding time in first-year students' busy schedules to provide this additional support can be difficult, however. Thus, the Clipper Project set out to test whether offering online, college level courses to high…

Efforts to recruit and retain a diverse graduate population at colleges and universities are undergoing a paradigm shift. Diversity has traditionally been operationalized as racial minority, yet recent court decisions have indicated that such a definition is legally problematic. As a result, institutional leaders are moving toward defining…

Increasingly, companies and corporations are seeking to diversify areas of their workforce that are predominantly male. Many of the positions in these areas are highly technical. However, despite abundant opportunities, women are not preparing themselves for technology-related careers. To develop a first step toward addressing this problem, a…

This research identified and compared the learning styles of 154 ethnically diverse, upper division undergraduate and graduate students in Allied Health utilizing the "Building Excellence" (BE) (Rundle & Dunn, 2000) and the "Productivity Environmental Preference Survey" (PEPS) (Dunn, Dunn, & Price, 1996). Relationships among age, class standing,…

The current study examined the relationships among parenting styles experienced in childhood, anxiety, motivation, and academic success in college students. Results suggested that fathers' authoritative parenting was related to decreases, whereas mothers' authoritarian parenting was related to increases, in college students' anxiety. Further,…

This study investigates the process of adjustment among adult learners by focusing on their own perceptions as they make the transition to higher education in an Irish setting, in order to gain a richer understanding about early university experience. The analysis of the journal-based reflections confirms existing insights about the complexity of…

Survival analysis is a statistical tool used to describe the duration between events. Many processes in medical research, engineering, and economics can be described using survival analysis techniques. This research involves studying engineering college student graduation using Cox proportional hazards models. Among male students with American…

The present study describes the development and initial validation of the Coping with the College Environment Scale (CWCES). Participants included 433 college students who took an online survey. Principal Components Analysis (PCA) revealed six coping strategies: planning and self-management, seeking support from institutional resources, escaping…

This study identified factors that were potential predictors of student completion in a collegiate honors program, evaluated the relative predictive importance of these factors, and used them to describe how the completion groups differed. Records were examined from 336 freshman honors program participants at a large, Midwestern, public…

Despite decades of interest in Ph.D. student outcomes, there have been few comprehensive studies of doctoral student completion. Compared to research on undergraduate students, longitudinal studies of doctoral student completion in multiple disciplines at multiple institutions are exceptionally rare. As a consequence, there is relatively scant…

The purpose of this analysis was to examine academic intentions, parental support, and peer support as predictors of self-reported academic behaviors among a sample of 329 first- and continuing-generation college freshmen. Regression analyses revealed that different variables predicted academic behaviors for the three groups examined (students…

Implementing effective student retention strategies is important for all institutions of higher education. This is especially true for smaller, private colleges as resources for higher education are stretched and the dependence on tuition revenue to maintain fiscal viability increases. This longitudinal study focuses on the utilization of…

This research examined degree completion through the lens of Snyder's hope theory (Snyder, 2000) in an effort to expand the research on student retention from Tinto's sociological theory to a theory that focuses on the psychological orientations that might help explain student success. The study focused on a sample of 443 master sergeants enrolled…