Purpose: As senior district leaders in US public schools make public statements about the importance of teachers of color for all students, their inaction in designing policies to recruit these educators can undermine diversity progress. This study explores the mixed messaging around one small urban district's effort to increase the ethnoracial…

This note demonstrates that the widely used Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) need not be generally viewed as a routinely dependable index for model selection when the bifactor and second-order factor models are examined as rival means for data description and explanation. To this end, we use an empirically relevant setting with…

This qualitative exploratory study investigated the selection and change of majors for nine HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) students. The study included individual structured interviews that provided data that answered the following research questions: 1) what factors influenced the initial selection of major, and 2) what…

The purpose of this study was twofold. The first aim was to better understand the selection criteria that college students of varying demographic backgrounds find most important when making a final selection of a college or university during their college search process and the promotional information they find to be most useful, particularly…

Collaboration is an early emerging component of successful cooperative relations that produces a cascade of positive social preferences between collaborators. Concurrently, robust preferences for affiliated others may restrict these benefits to in-group peers. We investigated how in-group affiliation (based on minimal group markers) and…

While a substantial body of work has shown that higher-SES students tend to apply to more selective colleges than their lower-SES counterparts, we know relatively less about "why" students differ in their application behavior. In this study, we draw upon a sociological approach to educational stratification to unpack the SES-based gap in…

Objective: To understand the rewards university students associate with two key decisions shaping food choices. Participants: Thirty-eight university students. Methods: In this exploratory research, we conducted focus groups to identify the rewards students associated with choosing to eat at the campus dining hall and their specific food choices…

Despite college rankings' popular yet controversial nature, there is little known about the relationship between college rankings and students. Prior literature suggests that students who make use of rankings are more privileged, yet there lacks a comprehensive analysis surrounding the types of students who place importance on rankings in more…

The allocation of scientific funding through grant programs is crucial for research advancement. While independent peer panels typically handle evaluations, their decisions can lean on personal preferences that go beyond the stated criteria, leading to inconsistencies and potential biases. Given these concerns, our study employs a novel method,…

Sociologists of education have a longstanding interest in studying the relationship between schooling and inequality in society. While we know education matters for who gets ahead, we still know relatively less about the processes and mechanisms behind this relationship. In my dissertation, I focus on higher education as a key site where…

The middle-classes use school choice as a strategy of class reproduction and comparative advantage. In this article, we show how middle-class parental school choice strategies are spatially dependent and how schooling preferences and final choices are bounded by the social and educational characteristics of the local education market of their…

This study provides an empirical approach to utilizing an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based system for identifying students' university choice factors that impact their matriculation decision. We created an AI-based chatbot that gathered both qualitative and quantitative data from nearly 1200 participants worldwide. The entire human-AI…

A common criticisms of school choice programs is that, instead of improving student achievement, they would increase school segregation. Parents may use different criteria to choose a school, such as proximity, school quality, or the school's ethnic/racial composition. As a result, the system would be segregated based on the parent's preferences.…