Higher education has increasingly been called upon to develop interdisciplinary programs -- particularly in STEM fields -- that prepare students to address multi-faceted, real world problems. While the tensions between disciplinary cultures and interdisciplinary programs have been previously studied, relatively little is known about the…

Given its ongoing struggles at attaining demographic diversity and its key role in nations' economies, the engineering workforce receives considerable attention from researchers and policymakers. Yet, prior studies and STEM recruitment initiatives have often underemphasized the variety among available engineering jobs and careers. It therefore…

In December 2023, TICAS published new research on the College Affordability Gap--the gap between students' total cost of attendance and non-loan aid available to them--in California, Michigan, and New York, with a focus on students eligible for Pell Grants. Our new report builds on this research with data from nine additional states (Colorado,…

The article explains the limited presence of geography in New England higher education as a result of the structure of the region's higher education system. Blending the geography and history of education literatures, it identifies type of control (public vs. private), institution type, urban location, multi-campus university systems, and the weak…

For the first time in U.S. history, a proposal for nationwide free community college passed through the House of Representatives in the fall of 2021. Although the provision was ultimately dropped from President Joe Biden's Build Back Better bill, its early presence suggests the political appeal of making college accessible to more Americans. These…

A Faculty Encouragement Scale (FES) was created to measure students' perception of faculty encouragement (challenge-focused and potential-focused encouragement) in college. This paper reports the psychometric properties of scores from the FES using a sample of 237 first-year engineering undergraduate students in a suburban public university.…

While schools are the center of attention in many regards throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, programs that prepare educators have not received nearly as much attention. How has the reliance on technology, shifts in daily norms with health precautions, and other pandemic-related changes affected how colleges and universities are preparing teachers…