This qualitative study explored the challenges that Hispanic and African American students experience during their education in STEM fields at community colleges. Students from four community colleges across Texas participated in this study. Drawing from focus group interviews, three themes were identified as self-perceived challenges to degree…

Background/Context: School segregation scholarship underlines that litigation challenging the segregation of Mexican American students in Texas schools stressed their legal racial identity as white. "The other white race strategy," as scholars call it, granted Mexican Americans the right to access resources designated for the country's…

This paper explores the research question and literature pertaining to school counselors and their roles and responsibilities and how they can have an effect on Latino/a students and their A-G college course requirement completion rates. Latinos/as students are the lowest academic achieving students in the nation among their peers and the lowest…

The present study sought to examine unique challenges that first-generation Latino male students (FGLMs) face, along with contributing factors that helped to shape their college experience when adjusting to two community colleges in southern California. The selected institutions were large community colleges located in urban settings within Los…

Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs) continue to transform U.S. higher education, causing scholars and practitioners to question how institutional agents serve minoritized communities, including Latinx/a/o people. Guided by Garcia et al.'s (2019) multidimensional framework on servingness, together with Garcia and Cuellar's (2023) concept of…

This study examined the persistence of first-year engineering students at a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) and a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) pre- and mid-COVID-19 interruptions and whether their characteristics (race/ethnicity, financial need status, first-generation status, SAT scores) predicted their persistence. Using…

Hispanic-Serving Institutions' (HSIs) diversification and Title V's anemic funding present a ripe condition for inequity. Hence, I interviewed 29 institutional actors across 17 HSIs to understand how they view their competitiveness for these grants and sources of inequity of this program. I identified four themes, demonstrating that an HSI's…

College students at a large south Texas university have proven consistently that they have a higher-than-average Body Mass Index (BMI), spend less time per week engaged in physical activity, and in general feel that they are less healthy than students in a national cross-sectional survey of college students by the American College Health…

Research Focus: Most of the current research focusing on Latinas succeeding academically has been conducted at the undergraduate and master's level. The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of the experience of Latinas in their doctoral program and what leads them to complete a doctoral degree. Latinas currently have low completion…

Many Hispanic adult immigrants to the United States acquire sufficient English skills to enable them to function in daily life but are left feeling that their skills are inadequate for college work. The problem addressed by the study is that the factors that are predictive of successful acquisition of college-level English skills had not been…

Social workers have an ethical obligation to challenge systemic oppression. Within the context of Latinx college students, there are many systemic barriers that negatively impact their mental health. Previous research focuses on identifying individual characteristics among Latinx students that promote academic success and psychological wellbeing.…

The cisheteropatriarchal climate of STEM education shapes oppressive experiences for queer and trans* (QT) students majoring in the sciences. Intersectionality of STEM experiences for QT students of color is missing in the literature. Thus, it has been unexplored how undergraduate STEM as a racialized space shapes variation in experiences among QT…

Objective: This case study describes the simultaneous establishment of a campus garden and food pantry at an urban, Hispanic-serving institution. Lessons learned and implications for practice are discussed. Participants: Students, staff, and faculty established a campus garden (February 2016) and food pantry (March 2017). Methods: University…

Currently, roughly one-third of college students fit the federal government's definition of first-generation college student status, meaning neither parent has earned a baccalaureate degree (RTI International, 2023). This study utilized archival data at an access institution in the southeastern United States in a causal-comparative study using…

This project aims to gain insight into the mechanisms by which schools in highly challenging environments avoided learning loss--or even improved--during the pandemic. Using a unique dataset covering multiple levels of school, health, and environmental data, we examine which factors led schools to 'beat the odds' when it comes to learning…