Northern New Mexico colleges and universities have worked to battle low degree attainment rates and declining enrollment numbers. This work examined how campus leaders in Northern New Mexico Hispanic Serving Institutions have created inclusive and educative campus climates for their students, including what data, experiences, and research they…

This research study focuses on female executives at two-year and four-year public Hispanic-Serving Institutions in the U.S. Southwest Border States by examining their lived experiences and career paths that helped them become successful senior administrators. Although most college students are female, women in leadership positions in academia are…

Improving community college transfer pathways in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields is an urgent educational equity issue in the United States. While there is abundant literature documenting the challenges community college transfer students face in their pursuit of a STEM bachelor's degree, there is limited research on the…

Institutional researchers (IRs) at higher education institutions fulfill a crucial role in identifying, processing, and disseminating data to administrators. Identifying effective ways for leaders to make sense of data is essential to advancing the most critical institutional issues, including achieving equitable student outcomes. However, leaders…

This phenomenological study aimed to explore the lived experiences of African American staff administrators who hold non-academic administrative positions at a Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI) situated in the southwestern region of the United States. Employing a phenomenological approach and purposeful sampling, the study involved conducting…

This study focused on understanding how "familismo," rurality, schooling experiences, and racial identity affect the postsecondary education journey of rural Latina/o/x students in the Southwest. Furthermore, the dynamic regarding Latina/o/x college access and opportunity was introduced with an emphasis placed on minoritized experiences…

The educational acts of the 21st century have affected public education for twenty years. Their roots historically go back to the 1960s. The original goal was to create an equitable education for children of color so that the achievement gap and dropout rate would be eliminated. Although well intended, these acts may have spawned many unintended…

This qualitative case study investigated how classroom interactions between instructors-students and students-students influenced Hispanic persistence in a Hispanic-serving community college in New Mexico. It was not known how Hispanic students perceived classroom interactions as well as how students perceived its influence on their persistence in…

I present an ethnographic study of thirteen nine-year-old, U.S.-born Latino children in rural New Mexico. I employ in-depth individual and group interviews, participant observation, and sand play (a method borrowed from clinical psychology in which children "make a world" in a box of sand) to explore how play interactions represent,…

This study explores the relationship between state and federal funding policies and the ability of minority-serving institutions (MSIs) to support low-income and minority students. The way US public higher education is financed has changed dramatically since the Great Recession. State appropriations to institutions have declined (SHEEO, 2017),…

The onus of this dissertation was to evaluate the educational conditions of Mexican American students forty years after the "Mexican American Education Study" published a six-volume study detailing the findings of the "Mexican American Education Study" (1970-1974). The "MAES" study focused on five southwest states…

This research explores how Latino/a high school students in New Mexico constitute their racial identities in this particular historical moment, the post-Civil Rights colorblind era. I explore what their chosen nomenclatures and employed discourses suggest about the relationship between their racial identities and academic achievement. The research…

This case study explored Advanced Placement open enrollment programs in New Mexico in an attempt to identify mechanisms embedded within the implementation practices which possibly prevent the equitable enrollment of students of color. Advanced Placement (AP) courses have become a gate-keeper in competitive college admissions. Therefore, a study of…

As an institution of higher education and as a Hispanic-serving institution, New Mexico State University has a responsibility to its students to provide the skills and experiences necessary for each and every student to become a responsible, reflective citizen, capable of making informed decisions. Postsecondary science has traditionally been…

This study examined vocabulary acquisition of elementary students in grades kindergarten through fifth in one rural New Mexico school. The school had 277 students. Hispanic students comprised nearly 80% of the student body. All students received free lunch and breakfast. The 65 students who participated in the study were assessed using the…