Many high school students first "visit" colleges and universities through digital means. For some students, institutional websites are the only exposure they have to the campus until fully admitted and enrolled. Thus, institutional websites are one of the most important media for potential students to secure information, and web presence…

Based on the school to prison pipeline that has garnered a great amount of attention in the past decade, many studies have underscored the need for Black male teacher presence in schools. However, not much beyond rhetoric has taken place to change educational policy or practices. While the student body in American K-12 education has become…

Academics can be too snug in their institutional silos. They sometimes think of one another as competitors for students, and as a result they duplicate scarce resources in mutually damaging ways. In this article, the author wants to argue that teaching-focused institutions have much to gain from partnerships with research universities on the…

As one of the top U.S. choices for international students, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has a solid reputation in China and a history of educating Chinese students that goes back more than a century. But the university did not realize until last June that its nickname in China is the "Cornfield Ivy" and that Chinese…

The purpose of this single, intrinsic, evaluative case study was to examine the problem of nontraditional transfer student completion at a private, religious-based, doctoral degree-granting, moderate research university in North Carolina. The following research questions guided the study: (a) How do institutional policies, procedures, and…

In the article, "Completion Agenda for Baby Boomers", Moltz highlights how community colleges are currently implementing programs, such as the American Association of Community Colleges' Plus 50 Completion strategy, to encourage older learners to return to America's college campuses. The effects of the recent recession and the…

The forty-something presidents are arriving, and not just at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. New chiefs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dartmouth College, Virginia Commonwealth University, and West Virginia University can't get their AARP cards yet. More are on the way. Fully 90 percent of presidents are at least 50 years old,…

This article reports how some colleges in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) men's basketball tournament have produced unlikely commercials. One of them is Drake University, which has a TV ad that consists entirely of a series of numbers, words, phrases, and stylized drawings in two shades of blue instead of the usual pictures of…

A few years ago, in "Student Success in College (SSiC)," the authors profiled twenty colleges and universities that were unusually effective in fostering student engagement and success, defined as better-than-predicted scores on the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and better-than-predicted graduation rates. These schools are…

This study analyzes the potential of major financial aid initiatives to serve as key elements of an institutional branding strategy. Concepts of branding and marketing serve as guiding frameworks for the analysis and interpretation of the findings. Using a case study approach, data were collected through interviews and document analysis at the…

Excerpts from recently-released Department of Education reports outline the success of Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Virginia in recruiting black students and faculty to predominantly white state colleges and universities. (MSE)

This paper describes a one-and-a-half day Distinguished Scholar Symposium during which undergraduate underrepresented minorities (URMs) from nearby schools visit the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) to learn about advanced degree programs in the biological sciences. The symposium created an environment that inspired URMs to…

When North Carolina native Evan Raleigh was in search of the perfect college, he had three things in mind: (1) the strength of the school's academic reputation; (2) the size of the school; and (3) the school's location and proximity to home. He found all three in the form of Wake Forest University. But Raleigh, who received a full academic…

By 2025, 22 percent of the U.S. college-age population will be Latino, a level already exceeded in four states: California, Florida, New York, and Texas. However, today, only seven percent of Latinos ages 18 to 24 have an associate's degree or higher compared to 9 percent of African Americans, 16 percent of white, and 25 percent of Asians of the…

Given the surging growth in the U.S. Latino population in recent years, nowhere have those increases been occurring faster than in the southeast. North Carolina, Arkansas and Georgia, for example, have seen population increases between 300 and 400 percent since the early 1990s. Naturally, Latino community leaders and state officials have been…