Open-access colleges are an important pathway to economic mobility for millions of Americans. But graduation rates at these colleges are low--for example, only 36 percent of first-time, full-time freshmen at community colleges graduate within three years. Over the last two decades, MDRC and others have conducted research to build the evidence base…

A commonly used metric for measuring college costs, drawn from data in the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), is expenditure per full-time equivalent (FTE) student. This article discusses an error in this per FTE calculation when using IPEDS data, especially with regard to community colleges. The problem is that expenditures…

Simplified categorizations have often led to college students being labeled as full-time or part-time students. However, at many universities student enrollment patterns can be much more complicated, as it is not uncommon for students to alternate between full-time and part-time enrollment each semester based on finances, scheduling, or family…

Community colleges play a crucial role in American higher education. As affordable alternatives to four-year universities, they offer a vital pathway to a four-year degree, as well as career and vocational training. Because these colleges also disproportionately serve low-income students and students of color, they are engines of opportunity…

This paper addresses the need for a more comprehensive framework of excellence in higher education, which goes beyond academic achievement alone, placing emphasis on its integration with personal characteristics, and acknowledging the diversity in the student population. Two research studies were conducted to establish this comprehensive…

Increasing graduation rates continues to be a high priority for administrators at many institutions of higher education. With longitudinal data from a large research university in the Western United States, the purpose of this study was to examine the potential relationship between matriculating with or without a major declared and degree…

Our goal in the current study was to identify the degree to which instructional setting (remote versus traditional) predicted students' academic achievement during the COVID-19 pandemic. A matched sample of data from 194 undergraduate students who were continuously enrolled at a private university in the southeastern United States from the spring…

For institutions intent on improving their research student outcomes, it is important to identify the variables most strongly associated with timely or tardy completions, which the university has the potential to influence or amend. For this to occur the analyses of doctoral completion times need to be conducted at an institution or discipline…

Community colleges and broad-access universities (those with minimally selective admissions policies) provide an opportunity for students across the United States to attain postsecondary degrees and economic mobility. However, graduation rates from such colleges are often low and there are many obstacles that can be difficult to overcome,…

With the rise of big data, artificial intelligence, and other emerging information technologies, an increasing number of students without computer science (CS) backgrounds have begun to learn programming. Programming is considered a complex task for beginners, and instructors find it difficult to quickly address all the problems that students…

This article examines the academic experiences of five mid-career female international students who were parents of preschool children. These women were studying on a 1-year Built Environment master's degree in the United Kingdom. We applied Tinto's "sense of belonging" as a theoretical framework to interview women who were studying full…

The main purpose of the presented study is to explore the existing risk of Internet addiction for undergraduate students of Czech universities. The research was conducted as quantitative research; a CIAS-R questionnaire was applied. The data were collected in the years just before the Covid-19 pandemic (between October 2019 and March 2020). 3,366…

Credit hour policies, or performance-based financial aid policies, have become increasingly popular among policymakers seeking to improve degree completion rates. In the Unites States, the college completion agenda has been bolstered by national calls from intermediary organizations and philanthropic foundations alike to raise the overall rate and…

Impostor phenomenon (IP) is the psychological construct used to describe potentially debilitating feelings of fraud and fear of being exposed as a phony in individuals who are actually high achieving and successful. The purpose of this study was to investigate the IP feelings of music education graduate students. A total of 130 master's and…

Recent data reveal that nearly half of all full-time undergraduate students in the U.S. are employed, which means balancing competing responsibilities related to work, school, family, and social lives. The purpose of this pilot interview study was to understand the experiences of full-time college students who work at least 30 h per week. Four…