The authors explored the influence of family background and students' perceived socioeconomic status with minoritized students' acculturation and transition experiences during their first-year, first-time enrollment at a predominantly White institution in the southeastern United States. Narrative interviews and "a priori" codes from the…

As a collective, women's experience in higher education has been disparate and differential to some men's experience over the last two centuries, fundamentally based on the societal influences of the time. In the formative years of higher education women attended higher education institutions for social stratification reasons or for marital choice…

University spaces can be experienced as unfamiliar and anxiety-inducing by working-class students. Early difficulties adjusting to university can lead to attrition. This article draws from a larger study examining the experiences of first-in-family (FIF) girls in one Australian city as they transition from secondary school into their first year of…

This study investigated the relationship between Saudi EFL learners' English language proficiency levels and their perceptions of the educational experience in the Preparatory Year Program using the Dundee Ready Education Environment Measure (DREEM). This study employed a mixed-method approach to explore learners' perceptions of the educational…

Latina students have been enrolling in colleges at increasing rates but experience disproportionate levels of STEM major declaration and persistence, even at Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs). This qualitative study explored the first-year experiences of Latina students at a newly designated HSI to gain insights into how to serve them better as…

This study is about the experiences for first-year women who take part in the Formal Panhellenic Recruitment process but are not accepted for membership. The participants narrate their experiences with Formal Panhellenic Recruitment as well as how the process affected their transition to their institution and how the process changed their path to…

Many studies have highlighted the limited 'opportunity structures' of working-class undergraduates. However, there have been few studies exploring how students' agentic internal conversations mediate societal structures. Internal conversation is a reflexive process in which thoughts and decisions are considered in relation to social circumstances.…

Recent studies have provided insight into the schooling experiences and lives of Black girls. These studies highlight the challenges that Black girls face in the school environment including underachievement, disproportionality in school discipline, deficit ideologies, and educator and counselor bias. The current study centers the voices on high…

This article examines the rhetoric of the conversion narratives told by a group of women joining a new social sorority on campus. I argue that these sorority conversion narratives are of interest to composition scholars because they document the emotional work involved in entering a community in one's first year of college. My close analysis of…

Low-income, first-generation students complete college at disproportionately low rates compared to their higher-income and continuing-generation peers. Actors across federal, state, and institutional levels have developed a wide variety of support programs to increase the retention and graduation rates of this group, and typically measure program…

Using a feminist geography framework, this qualitative study explores the first-year postsecondary experiences of Appalachian women through an interrogation of the ways in which they construct place and gender through their transition between two distinct geographic places: the home community and the university. A diversity of gender and place…

Using Merton's (1957) anticipatory socialization theory, this qualitative study explored how participation in dual credit in high school helped introduce 12 female students to the academic and social aspects of college to ease their first-year transitions. These students, who entered one Texas university with between 15 and 78 dual credits,…

Significant imbalances in the representation of ethnic/racial and gender minorities in STEM fields continue to contribute to current and future socioeconomic inequities that threaten the U.S.'s future. The National Academy of Sciences (2006, 2007) suggests that without equal participation of women and diverse ethnic/racial individuals within STEM,…

First-year college student retention is important to colleges and universities, as well as beyond academia. An analysis was conduced of emergent themes and subthemes from 144 nonreturning students' stories about school and about home throughout their first-year experience. These students wrote more negative stories about school-related events than…

This quantitative longitudinal study sought to highlight the difference between the proportion of men and women who planned to pursue a STEM major in the fields of mathematics, natural sciences, engineering, and computer and information sciences as freshmen, as well as to determine the proportion of men and women who changed their major choice by…