Despite growing calls to increase diversity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, students with learning disabilities (SWLDs) remain underrepresented in STEM at the postsecondary level. Considering this call for increased diversity as a means to expand and strengthen STEM success, we used the High School Longitudinal…

There is an increasingly large disparity in college graduation rates among low-income and first-generation college students. Research suggests that the main reason for this discrepancy is the lack of access to information and knowledge about the college process. First-generation students have fewer people in their social network who went to…

Washington, DC's Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), the only federally funded school voucher program in the United States, has provided private school scholarships to low-income students in DC since 2004. From its inception, the program has received significant attention in national debates and has been the subject of rigorous evaluations…

Emerging research suggests that first-generation queer and trans (QT) students experience disproportionate discrimination in schooling leading to disengagement early on in their educational trajectories. Although labeled as "at risk", first-generation QT students are actually more cognitively engaged in academics than their cisgender and…

This study compares Kalamazoo Promise (KPromise) students to non-Promise, public high school graduating students at a 4-year institution. The final sample for this study was N=9,969; n = 310 (3%) were KPromise students. Descriptive analysis suggests that KPromise students were racially more diverse and less affluent than non-Promise students.…

Noncognitive constructs such as self-efficacy, social awareness, and academic engagement are widely acknowledged as critical components of human capital, but systematic data collection on such skills in school systems is complicated by conceptual ambiguities, measurement challenges and resource constraints. This study addresses this issue by…

Dual enrollment (DE)--where students earn college credits during high school--is expanding rapidly. To facilitate DE, institutional actors across K-12 schools and colleges must build or repurpose structures across separate organizations to determine course offerings, assignments, modality, and composition. Yet the organization and implications of…

Borrowing has become increasingly central to U.S. students' college financing choices. However, concerns about indebtedness may serve as a barrier to attaining a college degree for many students, particularly women and Black and Hispanic students. This study explores the determinants and heterogeneous impacts of debt aversion, or aversion to…

The ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated educational inequities for students from institutionally marginalized communities. This article specifically examines the college (in)opportunities and conscious choices of rural Latinx students from California's San Joaquin Valley as they pursued higher education during the pandemic. This…

Although the purpose of this qualitative descriptive phenomenological study was to investigate how low-socioeconomic high school graduates describe their lived experiences in secondary schools and how their experiences influence them to graduate from high school and enroll in college. A purposeful sampling protocol was utilized to select 12…

Background/Context: Sometimes students with the academic credentials to attend more selective colleges enroll in a less selective institution or do not enroll at all, a phenomenon known as undermatching (Bowen et al., 2009; Roderick et al., 2011; Smith et al., 2013; Rodriguez, 2015). Undermatching is associated with lower graduation rates and…

Background/Context: English learners (ELs) have the potential to bring much-needed multilingual skills to the workforce, and most ELs aspire to graduate high school and earn a post-secondary credential (Gwynne, Pareja, Ehrlich, & Allensworth, 2012; Shi & Watkinson, 2019). But active ELs graduate high school at far lower rates than their…

This STP Highlights newsletter focuses on the first transitions of B.C. grade 12 graduates into B.C. public post-secondary education, in addition to total postsecondary enrolment trends in the B.C. public postsecondary system. The Student Transitions Project (STP) has collected more than twenty years of data and is currently assembling a more…

The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) is the nation's largest network of public charter schools. KIPP began as a network of charter middle schools designed to serve underserved communities, with the goal of closing achievement gaps and preparing students to succeed in college. KIPP has since expanded its model to include elementary and high…

Although persisters now represent the largest group of non-graduating high school students, they have received little attention in the research literature, leaving unanswered the question of how persisters differ from dropouts in terms of demographic characteristics, academic preparation, and key life outcomes. Using statewide…