Research studies have been ambivalent about whether enrolling in community college makes completing a bachelor's degree less likely than directly enrolling in a four-year institution. This study uses propensity score matching with a posttreatment adjustment to determine the treatment effect associated with taking the community college to…

Nearly all quantitative analyses in higher education draw from incomplete datasets-a common problem with no universal solution. In the first part of this paper, we explain why missing data matter and outline the advantages and disadvantages of six common methods for handling missing data. Next, we analyze real-world data from 5,905 students across…

Based on 22 focus groups conducted at institutions located in a Midwestern metropolitan region, this study explores working, commuting and adult-learner college students' implicit theories about financial aid policy and seeks to understand how students make sense of their own experiences in paying for college. The institutions participating…

Knowledge is presently limited on experiences and outcomes at four-year Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) and emerging HSIs. Multiple regression analyses, performed on data from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program, illuminate how background characteristics and student experiences at four-year HSIs, emerging HSIs, and non-HSIs…

This study utilizes theory from situated cognition to investigate faculty beliefs about student learning and their influence on teaching decisions. Results of interviews with and observations of 56 science and math faculty found that the two most common beliefs are: (a) students learn best through repeated practice, and (b) students have different…

This article provides a synthesis of literature on the conceptualization of students as customers and connects the rise of this understanding of students to the expansion of free-market logic into higher education. It details the ways in which the customer orientation appears to be incongruent with the educational lives of college students, and…

Various commissions and reports have called on colleges and universities to better prepare students for participation in a democratic society. A limit of such reports is that they often fail to consider how students might be categorized relative to their shared patterns of civic behaviors. Relying on alumni survey data from American College…

Researchers can deepen investigations of college teaching and learning by attention on how students construe a lesson's subject matter and on how teachers make sense of and respond to their students' subject-matter thinking in the moment. While it is possible to examine teaching and learning minus subject-matter depth, doing so obscures…

Using longitudinal data from the 2001 cohort of applicants to the Gates Millennium Scholars (GMS) program, the authors examined scaled measures of academic and social engagement in relation to labor market earnings to test whether the economic value of student engagement among high-achieving students of color differs by student characteristics.…

Postsecondary institutions are witnessing an increase in the number and severity of student mental health problems, necessitating an understanding of the difficulties these students encounter in striving for higher education. The authors conducted a critical interpretive synthesis of 10 articles pertaining to difficulties experienced by students…

This article examines how peer interactions in college organizations (Greek, ethnic, and religious) affect interracial friendships, including whether peer interaction in student organizations mediates the relationship between structural diversity and interracial friendship. Involvement in ethnic student organizations was non-significant;…

This study examined longitudinal data by multiple regression analyses to determine personal and institutional characteristics associated with students' openness to diverse perspectives. Students' openness was positively associated with (a) feeling that the university was committed to diversity issues, (b) taking diversity courses, and…

The authors articulate objections to the organization of the recent special issue on student engagement and respond in detail to three criticisms leveled in that issue. Situating their response relative to longstanding calls to make research more relevant to practice, they argue that the validity critique inappropriately focuses on criterion…

This qualitative study relies on Freire's conception of liberatory praxis to examine White male college students' becoming aware of racism and translating awareness into action. The participants developed racial cognizance via cross-racial contact and course content. They also tended to be open to interrogating racism and racial privilege due to…

Residential colleges in large, public research universities purport to create a small liberal arts environment with the resources of a major university, but little empirical attention has been paid to their claims of effectiveness. This study examined one facet of the liberal arts ideal, the development of lifelong learners. Hierarchical Linear…