Over the past two years, Pullias Center researchers and practitioners from the nonprofit Get Schooled have collaborated on a project designed to boost first year persistence and success at California State University, Dominguez Hills. This brief is intended to share outcomes and lessons learned from implementing the texting component of Get…

Through their work at the University of Southern California (USC) with students in a face-to-face mentoring program, the authors understood that many qualified low-income and/or first generation students were slipping through the cracks when it came time to apply to college. These were students who had done well in school and had met college…

In 2014, researchers at the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California (USC) received a grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement in Postsecondary Education's First in the World program to do research aimed at understanding how games can be used to cultivate college knowledge and…

This article draws upon two conceptual frameworks--institutional culture in education and innovation studies--to contextualize findings from a digital intervention for underrepresented students applying to college. The qualitative data that inform this study's findings include 88 open-response surveys with school teachers, as well as campus…

Over the past six years, the Pullias Center for Higher Education has been engaged in research designed to better understand the potential of digital tools to increase access to college. Their most recent $3.2 million "First in the World" (FITW) federal grant has enabled the Center to implement and evaluate an online game-based…