Direct Admissions is a system developed and piloted recently in the US that defaults graduating high school students into post-secondary admittance by data-matching their profiles (transcripts, standardized test scores, and prerequisites) with institutions' preset eligibility criteria. As applicant and institutional interest in direct admissions…

The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent teaching adaptions highlighted issues of equitable student access. Resulting pivots in response to the pandemic, however, offer opportunities to adapt pandemic related pivots to traditional learning environments in ways that will increase student access. This brief manuscript highlights different ways students…

Background/Context: Our study takes an asset-based approach to examine the experiences of Puerto Rican undergraduates and the consequences of cascading disasters (e.g., hurricanes, earthquakes, COVID-19). Puerto Rican undergraduates were prone to vulnerability during cascading disasters because they lacked emergency supplies (e.g., flashlights),…

This study explored English Language Learner (ELL) immigrant students' barriers to accessing postsecondary education at four-year colleges and universities in the post-COVID-19 era. Grounded in Cross's (1981) conceptual framework, which categorizes barriers adult learners face in higher education as institutional, situational, and dispositional,…

University-based homeschool physical education programs are one way to ensure homeschooled children have access to high-quality, standards-based opportunities to develop their physical literacy. These programs have traditionally been held on site at hosting institutions and were greatly impacted by the limitations imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic.…

For decades, research has explored the learning experiences of students in community college. This study adds to the existing literature and brings in the learning experience for community college students since the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this study was to explore how COVID-19 shifted the learning experience for criminal justice…

Segregation is often seen in terms of race. However, it can also be based on socioeconomic status. Public colleges and universities in the U.S. had highly divergent responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite operating under similar health and legal considerations, campuses at most elite institutions were treated as essential functions while the…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether rural college students had significantly different probabilities of experiencing academic, financial, and health-related difficulties during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to students attending urban/suburban colleges or universities. The data were drawn from a multi-institutional survey of 31,575…

Over the last decade, York University, through the Borderless Higher Education for Refugees Project, has provided higher education in situ to refugee and local teachers in Dadaab, Kenya, one of the world's largest and longest standing refugee camps. In 2020, COVID-19 aggravated the insecurity and marginalization already present in Dadaab, which…

The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore the lived experiences of selected Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) faculty toward implementing universal design for learning (UDL) guidelines and applications in the online environment. Data was collected through semi-structured interview sessions with ten…

Online education and distance learning has become the new normal since the pandemic hit in 2019. The effects have brought out adverse changes in educational spaces and teaching pedagogies and mental health especially for learners in colleges and universities. This paper aims to investigate the barriers to sustainable higher education and the…

Online Work Integrated Learning (WIL), where university students complete authentic work tasks for a remote workplace, is growing in prevalence, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Issues of equity in online WIL are underexplored, so we undertook a qualitative research synthesis of the literature to inform WIL provision for students from…

The universal design for learning framework aims to remove barriers from the learning environment so that as many students as possible can fully participate in it. The COVID19 pandemic has brought about additional challenges in higher education, but in many cases, it has also provided a unique opportunity to examine change. This study investigated…

Most universities worldwide had to temporarily interrupt face-to-face education and start Emergency Distance Education (EDE) due to the COVID-19 outbreak. It is useful to identify the difficulties and problems that universities faced in this process in order that they can carry out a similar process more efficiently in the future. Therefore, this…

The sudden outbreak of COVID-19 made universities switch rapidly to e-learning, which enabled continuous access to education. Thus, the evaluation of e-learning engagement is essential to ensure students are engaged in their studies just as it is in the conventional face-to-face classroom. The students are totally in control of their participation…