The University of California, Riverside has raised its four- and six-year graduation rates significantly over the last decade while maintaining near-equity in graduation rates among the four major racial-ethnic groups and across socio-economic strata. The paper discusses campus policies and practices that have helped to produce these results. The…

Objective: To examine whether policies prohibiting smoking on college campuses contribute to greater decreases in smoking. Participants: This study compares smoking prevalence and perceptions of prevalence pre/post a smoking ban enacted in 2015 by using repeated cross-sectional surveys administered at a university in 2011 (n = 1.548), 2013 (n =…

Objective: This study examined the prevalence of food insecurity (FI) among students attending Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the Southeastern United States. Participants: Students attending four HBCUs (N = 351) completed an anonymous Web-based survey. Methods: Food insecurity was assessed using the 2-item Hunger Vital…

Placement policies are intended to match students with appropriate courses in order to improve student success, but how do you evaluate these policies? In this article, we evaluate four placement policies at Towson University by considering three categories of outcomes: long-term outcomes such as graduation and retention rates, short-term or…

The mental health of college students has become one of the top concerns in higher education. The number of students reporting psychological distress and seeking services has dramatically increased over the last two decades. Colleges are struggling to address longstanding mental health inequities such as those facing students of color (SOC) and…

Objective/Research Question: This article examines the racial equity of transfer incentive policies by responding to the research question: How do students of differing races and ethnicities vary in their opportunity to benefit from transfer incentive policies? Methods: We utilized a mixed-methods approach, grounded in Critical Race Theory (CRT).…

Objective: To assess the characteristics of campus populations who were opposed to a vape-free campus policy and examine factors associated with opposition to a vape-free campus policy among those who indicated support for a tobacco-free policy. Participants: Faculty, staff, and students (N=2210) in a Midwestern university participated. Methods:…

The current socio-political moment--rife with racial tensions and overt bigotry--has exacerbated longstanding racial inequities in higher education. While educational scholars have developed conceptual tools and offered data-informed recommendations for rooting out racism in campus policies and practices, this work is largely inaccessible to the…

A heterogeneous student body is valued in part because diverse interactions among students help create educated and competent citizens and promote learning and development. Campus housing is a primary setting for diverse interactions as students navigate living with individuals who differ from themselves. This study investigated how the roommate…

In an effort to align its college admission requirements with the new K-12 science standards, the University of California (UC) recently proposed to increase its high school science admissions eligibility requirement--known as area D--from two to three years. UC's new policy has the potential of improving student science learning and readiness for…

Title IX prohibits sex-based harassment (SBH) in all federally funded educational activities, yet little is known about SBH in K-12 schools. We used the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) data (N = 96,440) to examine rates and school-, district-, and state-level predictors of SBH in K-12 schools. Results found the vast majority of schools had…

The student loan crisis has become a buzz topic that presidential candidates frequently discuss in debates and town halls. Today, accumulated student loan debt equals $1.6 trillion, exceeding total accumulated car loans and credit card debt. What makes this a crisis is the fact that approximately 22 percent of student loan borrowers default on…

How does racism persist and even worsen on college campuses amidst pro-diversity university efforts? From interviewing college students and interrogating university materials, this article argues that public universities' heightened revenue-generating functions inspire them to sell diversity as an attractive quality, divorced from its association…

Community college is a gateway to postsecondary education for millions of college students in the United States yet only 13% of those intending to earn a bachelor's degree do so within six years of enrolling (Shapiro et al., 2017). The process of transferring from one postsecondary institution to another is fraught with structural, financial, and…

Assembly Bill 705 (AB 705) sought to increase successful completion of transfer-level math and English courses by addressing systemic problems in traditional placement policies and curricular structures. The law requires colleges to maximize the probability that students who enroll in credit English as a second language (ESL) courses complete…