The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to examine the role of a debt mitigation program as an incentive for adult student reengagement and to ascertain students' perceptions of the institution after reenrolling in college via the program. The debt mitigation program was the first in the nation to forgive past-due student institutional debt,…

Success Boston, a city-wide initiative to boost college persistence and ultimately improve college completion rates for Boston's high school graduates, has one-on-one transition coaching as a core strategy. Transition coaching offers students sustained, proactive, and responsive support in their first two years of college. Specifically, coaches…

Postsecondary education leaders are eager for reliable data to strategically plan for the next year through the next decade, and WICHE's projections of high school graduates are among the most relied upon sources. As WICHE has reported several times since the pandemic began, the disruption to student populations was illustrated with the shift of…

More than half of states have implemented tuition-free college policies aimed at reducing attendance costs and incentivizing enrollment. We review the academic literature on the design features and impacts of these tuition-free policies, and we analyze an initiative Virginia implemented in 2021 called Get a Skill, Get a Job, Get Ahead (G3), which…

Italian high school students carried out some activities within career guidance actions organized by the Department of Chemistry of Sapienza University (Rome) in order to promote enrollments in a chemistry Bachelor's course, thus remedying the shortage of professional chemists. Novel didactic sequences have been designed to facilitate the…

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…

This qualitative study focuses on understanding the motivational factors driving Latino students to pursue higher education and the obstacles hindering their enrollment. We conducted eleven focus group sessions, involving five distinct groups: students, parents, teachers, and counselors from public high schools, as well as two adult learner…

Community colleges serve many critical purposes for residents within their local service areas by providing relatively low-cost (Ma & Pender, 2023), open-access postsecondary education and workforce-focused training (Jacobs & Worth, 2019). A recent national survey of previously enrolled community college students finds that "gaining…

The Institute for Higher Education Policy's (IHEP) Equitable Value Explorer (EVE) data tool provides measures of economic value based on students' post-college earnings relative to the state in which their postsecondary institution is located. Such a broad geographic unit, however, may lead to inadequate comparisons for institutions like community…

Access to opportunities for higher education is a classic topic in the sociology of higher education, but studies on access to doctoral education are still rare. This paper drew on data from the 2016 National Master's Graduate Survey to analyze this issue, focusing on the effects of gender and the types of the institution on access to doctoral…

A growing number of university graduates delay workforce entry to reverse transfer to a community college for additional training. This trend is common in 2-year physical therapist assistant (PTA) programs where over 34% of all PTA students have a prior earned bachelor's degree. The problem addressed in this study is that little research is…

This study addressed the declining market share of students from the Peoples Republic of China at a university in the New England region of the United States. This study focused on six students from the People's Republic of China's lived experiences and how those experiences influence future enrollments. The process selected for this study was a…

The current paper examines associations between preschool cognitive and behavioral skills and indicators of college enrollment in a sample (n = 379) of primarily Black and Hispanic youth growing up in low-income areas of Chicago. Although we found that most early cognitive and behavioral skills were only weakly or moderately related to later…

Tuition resets decrease an institution's published tuition price to more closely align it with the actual net price most students pay. The strategy is employed to increase the institution's applicant pool, yielding more admits with the ultimate goal of increasing enrollment and net revenue for the institution. The research project examined…

"A Dream Derailed? Investigating the Causal Effects of College Closure on Student Outcomes" is the second of three planned novel reports from a collaborative research team of State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) and the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) Research Center, seeking to quantify the impacts of…