High-impact practices, programs, and activities where students commit considerable time and effort in different settings can help to define the first-year college experience and are likely to increase success in areas like persistence, deep learning, and self-reported gains.

This chapter will examine characteristics of first-year experience programs in community colleges, with specific attention to the extant research about their effectiveness, the ways in which research and program delivery can be integrated, and the unique challenges of delivering FYE programs and conducting research about them in community colleges.

This chapter examines glass ceiling effects through the metric of salary equity.

This chapter explores eliminating faculty-related glass ceiling effects through academic governance.

The author provides a framework to help scholars in the field of higher education to be critical. Additionally, the author reflects and comments on the chapters included in this special volume. Finally, this chapter ends with a discussion of the opportunities and challenges of critical quantitative inquiry.

The author discusses the importance of critical quantitative research for studies of immigrant students, a large and growing group, whose higher education experience is crucial to the future of the United States. The author outlines some of the distinctions to be made among immigrant students and recommends areas of future inquiry.

This chapter briefly traces the development of the concept of critical quantitative inquiry, provides an expanded conceptualization of the tasks of critical quantitative research, offers theoretical explanation and justification for critical research using quantitative methods, and previews the work of quantitative criticalists presented in this…

This chapter examines the relationship between student self-reported gains and college satisfaction, and it considers whether self-reported gains constitute a form of college satisfaction.

This chapter describes a study that compares two approaches (self-reported effort [SRE] and response time effort [RTE]) for identifying low-effort examinees in student learning outcomes assessment. Although both approaches equally discriminated from measures of ability (e.g., SAT scores), RTE was found to have a stronger relationship with test…

This chapter is a case study of one institution's effort to institutionalize a process through which student development is promoted through active engagement with the community.

This chapter describes the impact of an alternative spring break program on students at the Savannah College of Art and Design over a set of years as well as its effectiveness as a service-learning tool.

Multilevel modeling (MLM), also referred to as hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) or mixed models, provides a powerful analytical framework through which to study colleges and universities and their impact on students. Due to the natural hierarchical structure of data obtained from students or faculty in colleges and universities, MLM offers many…

Among the diverse and varied missions of community colleges is the provision of instruction for students who have either been underserved by their previous educational institutions or not had the opportunity to complete high school. Included under this umbrella are low-performing high school students, individuals with low basic skills, and those…

The need for educational programs to show their return on investment is exemplified in the intense debate surrounding gainful employment programs--defined as programs that lead to gainful employment in a recognized occupation and theoretically differ from programs that offer education in the liberal arts or prepare students for further education.…

Surveys and benchmarks continue to grow in importance for community colleges in response to several factors. One is the press for accountability, that is, for colleges to report the outcomes of their programs and services to demonstrate their quality and prudent use of resources, primarily to external constituents and governing boards at the state…