Recent data published by the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC) found that campus community impacts student success by 44 percent. Students are more likely to thrive when they have access to people who understand and relate to them and when they can gain support from programs that value their culture and ideology. Including…

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…

A substantial proportion of Latina/o college students enroll at Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) and emerging HSIs. Utilizing data from the University of California, Los Angeles Cooperative Institutional Research Program, this study quantitatively examines the choice process of Latina/os enrolled at 4-year HSIs, emerging HSIs, and non-HSIs.…

Objectives: What are some of the key reasons Asian American students enroll in community colleges? Method: We utilized qualitative methods, conducting 49 interviews in Southern California with current Asian American community college and transfer students at three institutions. Results: We identified five key reasons why Asian American…

Almost two decades after Delgado Bernal's theorization of pedagogies of the home, this article examines pedagogies of the home of four Chicana/o college-educated families to understand the role of parent engagement not only in the college choice processes but also in college completion and graduate school enrollment. Using Chicana feminisms to…

This study examines how an urban, California high school supports undocumented students' college access and the challenges the school and students encounter. Employing case study methodology, school observations and interviews with 14 undocumented students and 13 educators were conducted to gain a deeper understanding of the processes involved in…

This study explored the college access and choice processes of high-achieving African American students who were admitted to University of California (UC) campuses but elected to enroll elsewhere. Employing critical race theory as an interpretive framework, the study found that many of these students were denied access to their priority UC…

High-achieving African American students in California are not attending University of California (UC) campuses. Due to hyper-implementations of Proposition 209, which limited UC campuses' ability to use race as a significant admission criteria, the UC system and individual UC campus policies have scaled back their efforts to recruit…

The study of elites is enjoying a revival at a time of increasing economic inequality. Sociologists of education have been leaders in this area, researching how affluent families position their children to compete favorably in a highly stratified higher education system. However, scholars have done less research on how students do symbolic work of…

Although current and former English Learner (EL) or "ever-EL" students comprise one of the fastest-growing K-12 populations, we still know relatively little about the factors that influence their college-going. Using Perna's seminal college-going model as a launching point, we propose a policy-driven empirical approach to explore how…

Guided by the frameworks of college-conocimiento and the cooling out function, this study examined the college choice process of Latina/o/x students who attended an under-resourced urban high school. Data for this study consisted of interviews with ten institutional agents, two oral history interviews with 34 Latina/o/x students, and observation…

In this article, author Annie Nguyen describes her personal encounters with the "Model Minority Myth" as a young Vietnamese American in a doctoral program. This myth assumes that all Asian Americans are inherently smart and high achieving, which is problematic when in fact there are many Asian American individuals who perform poorly.…

This section shares recent dissertations and theses with the "Journal of International Students" readers. There were about 139 graduate dissertations and theses related to the issues and challenges of international students in 2016. The complete versions of these selected dissertations are available in the ProQuest, Michigan-based…

Although some scholars report that all students are better served by attending more prestigious postsecondary institutions, others have argued that students are better off attending colleges where they are about average in terms of academic ability and suffer worse outcomes if they attend schools that are "out of their league" at which…

Urban African American teens are unprepared to compete for jobs in the global marketplace, but higher education professionals could partner with parents to reverse this trend. After reviewing parent involvement literature, this paper shares findings from a study of urban African American parents involved in their children's outreach programs. It…