There is a paucity of African American female students entering engineering studies and the engineering profession itself. The purpose of this phenomenological case study was to examine the context within which African American female engineering students matriculate in engineering programs and to explore the role of environmental influences,…

Utilizing longitudinal data of 3477 students from 28 institutions, we examine the effects of structural diversity and quality of interracial relation on students' persistence towards graduation within six years. We utilize multilevel discrete-time survival analysis to account for the longitudinal persistence patterns as well as the nested…

"Professional commitment" has been defined as "one's attitude toward one's profession or vocation." This study developed and tested a model to predict the development of professional commitment in students by examining the qualities of the college experience that may lead to that commitment. Factors such as background and…

A study investigated the influence of interpersonal variables, such as communicative competence, loneliness, and roommate rapport, upon persistence in college. The study includes self-reports as well as reports of roommates' behaviors. Subjects were 200 freshman students (out of a total of 350) who participated in several sections of a…

The process by which the student formulates conceptions of the university and the impact of this process on the decision to persist at the university were studied with first-time Mexican American college freshmen. A multiple-subject research design--a modified analytic induction technique--was employed in order to develop a descriptive model.…

It has been hypothesized that college students develop differently in various areas of experience, that they learn to deal with interpersonal relationships early in their college experience, but that they may not have time to develop leisure interests. Instruments designed to assess growth on three of Chickering's student development vectors…

Given that people's expectations influence their behavior, it is important to examine the expectations of incoming college freshman whose beliefs and hopes may help to determine their academic and social integration, which have been linked to persistence and retention rates. Of 212 African American freshman who completed the "University New…

A longitudinal study was conducted to determine the factors influencing college student persistence in remaining in school. Persistence was examined at two points: after the first year and 4 years after enrollment. The study was conducted at an urban university using the American College Testing's Entering Student Survey and Student Opinion…

Mexican American college students' views about the context influencing their decision to persist or leave the university were studied. Two sociologies of everyday life, symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology, guided the inquiry. Perceptions of college-going behavior before and during the freshman year were obtained from 18 students and…

This paper describes an effort to find ways to respond to the challenges of supporting student and faculty diversity by providing data about the experiences of Latino undergraduates at the University of Michigan. Data were collected from a random sample of 73 Latino undergraduates and a comparison group of 24 non-Latinos. The Latino group…

A design for improving the quality of information available for continuous operational study of student retention at the University of Hartford in Connecticut was examined involving a microcomputer based decision support system for student retention research. The system, an interactive modeling approach to conduct longitudinal and comparative…

Five hundred incoming students attending Mount Saint Vincent University (Nova Scotia) were selected to participate in a study designed to compare the expectations and experiences of traditional students (who entered immediately after high school or transferred from another university or college) and nontraditional students (who entered part-time…

Freshmen entering Indiana University in 1974 and leaving after two years but in good academic standing were surveyed in 1977. Those who were re-enrolled in an Indiana University System institution (57 students) were surveyed apart from the 303 students who had not re-enrolled. Academic and biographical information was gathered from school records.…

Educational practice and barriers to full participation of Alaska Natives in postsecondary education were examined in an ethnographic study begun in October 1980 by the University of Alaska. Focus was on the institutional placement, organization, and functioning of gatekeeping encounters within the university, primarily the central Fairbanks…

The influence on freshman student attrition of the group with whom a student lives (i.e., the composition or contextual character of the collegiate residence unit) was investigated. Based on Tinto's (1975) model of college student attrition, a longitudinal study was conducted at a large, independent, residential university in New York State having…