This mixed-method analysis presents a model of college students' civic commitments and capacities for community action. Quantitative findings indicate that after controlling for background characteristics, campus contexts, and college experiences, students' acquisitions of commitments to and skills for contributing to the larger community are…

This study investigates whether public universities respond to declines in state appropriations by increasing nonresident freshman enrollment. State higher education appropriations declined substantially during the 2000s, compelling public universities to become more dependent on net-tuition revenue. State policy controls often limit the growth of…

Within the past decade, there has been a growing number of studies examining undermatch--when students apply to or enroll in institutions less selective than their academic qualifications permit. To estimate undermatch, researchers must define institutions' selectivity levels and determine which students are eligible to gain admission to these…

The purpose of this paper is to describe effect coding as an alternative quantitative practice for analyzing and interpreting categorical, multi-raced independent variables in higher education research. Not only may effect coding enable researchers to get closer to respondents' original intentions, it allows for more accurate analyses of all race…

Higher education researchers and practitioners have emphasized the educational benefits of fostering meaningful interracial interaction on college campuses. The link between cross-racial interaction and student growth has received considerable empirical attention, but far less is known about whether and when interracial friendship predicts student…

This study investigates the effects of adults' enrollment in and graduation from a two-year college on their hourly wages and occupational status in U.S. by employing a growth curve model and a piecewise model. College enrollment reduced hourly wages and occupational status by 13.8% and 2.74 points, respectively. Less-educated workers whose wages…

Having an effective segmentation strategy is key to the viability of any organization. This is particularly true for colleges, universities, and other nonprofit organizations--who have seen sharp declines in private contributions, endowment income, and government grants in the past few years, and face fierce competition for donor dollars…

This study examines the extent to which college seniors' plans for graduate school are related to their tendency to engage in deep approaches to learning (DAL) and their academic environments (majors) as classified by Holland type. Using data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, we analyzed responses from over 116,000 seniors attending…

The match between a student's academic ability and the academic ability of the student's peers has been found to exert influence on student educational aspirations. Research on this has garnered mixed results with some finding that students whose peers have higher ability are more likely to develop a poor self-concept and lower their academic…

Vocational education is increasingly seen as a viable path to higher education and not simply a direct route to the labor market. This paper studies the relationship between the secondary school track attended by Chilean students (vocational or academic) and their subsequent outcomes in access to and persistence in postsecondary vocational…

While the public is concerned that emphasizing research performance among university faculty results in inadequate attention to undergraduate teaching, research on the relationship between research and teaching in higher education has failed to confirm or deny the validity of this concern. To empirically test this popular concern, we examined how…

Using econometric analysis on survey data from European-born and European-educated researchers who are internationally mobile after their PhD within Europe or to the United States, we find significant positive effects from international mobility on scientific productivity, as well as several other positive career development effects. European…

The purpose of this paper was to examine differences between undergraduate students who had multiple exposures to an assessment of moral reasoning development (DIT-2) and students of the same cohort who had fewer exposures to the same assessment. Controlling for a host of individual covariates, the analysis determined that students who took the…

More community college students are taking out loans than ever before and their median debt levels are increasing. This trend is disconcerting because community college borrowers are overrepresented among loan defaulters and those who dropout without having earned a degree. While not without criticism, a growing number of community colleges are…

Using the College Board SAT registration and questionnaire data of 2010 high school graduating seniors, we found clear patterns by race/ethnicity and parental education on two outcomes: out-of-state score-sending and out-of-state college attendance. White students had the highest rates and Hispanic students had the lowest rates, and there was a…