Fifty years ago, the expansion of access to higher education was expected to result in greater socio-economic equality. Instead, segmentation in mass higher education systems has called into question the effective democratization of access to higher education. This phenomenon appeared first in higher income countries, allowing the identification…

School reopening is essential for restoring normalcy after a period of disruption. However, executing this endeavor during a pandemic requires a comprehensive strategy to ensure success. Consulting stakeholders is consequently crucial for informed and inclusive policies. Prior works recruited public officials, health authorities, teachers, and…

The barriers that indigenous students face in pursuing higher education are substantial and far-reaching. This study seeks to understand the impact of institutional support on engagement of "Orang Asli" students and its effects on their learning outcomes and academic achievement. Quantitative data were collected from 160 "Orang…

Athens State University is an upper-division university that serves junior and senior undergraduate students, as well as graduate students. 100% of the students enrolled transfer from another institution. The sustainability of ASU requires policies and procedures that make the transfer process seamless and foster student success. As funding for…

Although there have been many studies investigating international students, many of them focused on the students who travel in pursuit of higher education in English countries and/or universities. This current qualitative study is intended to explore the experiences of international students, particularly the challenges, and strategies to deal…

The study aimed to investigate the perceptions and practices of continuous assessment in government higher learning institutions in Ethiopia. A survey research design with both qualitative and quantitative approaches involving concurrent triangulation strategy was employed. The study period was from February 2020 and November 2020. A total of 354…

Nearly half of students who enter college do not graduate. The majority of efforts to increase college completion have focused on supporting students before or soon after they enter college, yet many students drop out after making significant progress towards their degree. In this paper, we report results from a multi-year, large-scale…

Nearly half of students who enter college do not graduate. The majority of efforts to increase college completion have focused on supporting students before or soon after they enter college, yet many students drop out after making significant progress towards their degree. In this paper, we report results from a multi-year, large-scale…

A strategy for allocating merit-based awards and need-based aid is critical to a university. Such a strategy, however, must address multiple, sometimes competing objectives. We introduce an approach that couples a gradient boosting classifier for predicting outcomes from an allocation strategy with a local search optimization algorithm, which…

This work builds upon the work of the Postsecondary Value Commission (PVC), a group founded in 2019 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Consisting of 30 leaders in higher education, including AASCU's former president Mildred García who served as co-chair, the PVC came together to answer the question "what is college worth?" by…

Idaho is facing an educational crisis, consistently ranking 50th in the nation for high school students directly enrolling in college. A startling college attrition rate results in only one out of every ten Idaho high school graduates earning a college degree. College students have been shown to possess a unique set of stressors, which can…

This dissertation is motivated by a need in the higher education learning sciences field to understand the cultural, social, and emotional processes of student learning and development in advancing equity for students from first-generation, low-income, and marginalized backgrounds. To address this need, I develop and examine a sociocultural…

Do state government policies and institutions promote access to postsecondary education by economically disadvantaged students? I analyze the number of state residents receiving federal Pell grants relative to the college-age population raised in low-income households. Using data for 1993-2008, I estimate separate models for total Pell recipients…

The State of Higher Education in California is a series of reports by the Campaign for College Opportunity that provide comprehensive data on the current state of college access and completion for our state and what it means for our economy. This report analyzes the state of Black Californians in education. Specifically, this report reviews…

How much university students learn in their studies is highly debated and important to understanding the value of higher education. Yet, information on learning gains at this level are scarce. Our paper contributes to the debate by using unique data for Brazil to estimate absolute test score gains across various fields of study in higher education…