The ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated educational inequities for students from institutionally marginalized communities. This article specifically examines the college (in)opportunities and conscious choices of rural Latinx students from California's San Joaquin Valley as they pursued higher education during the pandemic. This…

Although the purpose of this qualitative descriptive phenomenological study was to investigate how low-socioeconomic high school graduates describe their lived experiences in secondary schools and how their experiences influence them to graduate from high school and enroll in college. A purposeful sampling protocol was utilized to select 12…

Background/Context: Sometimes students with the academic credentials to attend more selective colleges enroll in a less selective institution or do not enroll at all, a phenomenon known as undermatching (Bowen et al., 2009; Roderick et al., 2011; Smith et al., 2013; Rodriguez, 2015). Undermatching is associated with lower graduation rates and…

Enrollment Management has been adopted by institutions of higher education as a strategy for managing enrollment to meet institutional goals, and it increasingly manifests as an administrative division that supports students. Many models of Enrollment Management exists, with the Divisional model being the most centralized; however, even within a…

Higher education institutions across the United States have increasingly faced an uncertain future as student populations shift, financial pressures mount, and skepticism rises regarding the value of higher education (Seltzer, 2018). As a result, university leaders find themselves endeavoring upon a blind venture of adapting the various corporate…

Financial stability in higher education continues to decrease as enrollment declines. Higher education administrators who do not address declining enrollment may experience lost revenues, potentially leading to inoperability. Grounded in Kotter's eight-stage process for leading change, the purpose of this qualitative single case, descriptive study…

This dissertation further investigates predominant issues in the educational pipeline, that is, both the higher education and K-12 context. In particular, I first attempt to answer why post-secondary enrollment at U.S. colleges and universities has increased among all students, but racial/ethnic and gender inequalities persist in the college…

Senior leaders of rural community colleges are presented with many challenges that affect the current operation of their college as they attempt to also address the future of the college towards efficiency and growth. In response, rural community colleges require a dual approach that balances the exploitation of learning from the past while also…

International student enrollment (ISE) has become a hallmark of world-class higher education institutions (HEIs), particularly as global student mobility has grown exponentially worldwide in the last several decades. Although the United States (U.S.) has welcomed the largest numbers of international students since the 1950s, ISE shrunk by 10% in…

Background/Context: English learners (ELs) have the potential to bring much-needed multilingual skills to the workforce, and most ELs aspire to graduate high school and earn a post-secondary credential (Gwynne, Pareja, Ehrlich, & Allensworth, 2012; Shi & Watkinson, 2019). But active ELs graduate high school at far lower rates than their…

This STP Highlights newsletter focuses on the first transitions of B.C. grade 12 graduates into B.C. public post-secondary education, in addition to total postsecondary enrolment trends in the B.C. public postsecondary system. The Student Transitions Project (STP) has collected more than twenty years of data and is currently assembling a more…

The Accountability Plan is an annual report that is closely aligned with the Board of Governors' 2025 System Strategic Plan. This report enhances the System's commitment to accountability and strategic planning by fostering greater coordination between University Boards of Trustees and the Board of Governors regarding each institution's direction…

The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) is the nation's largest network of public charter schools. KIPP began as a network of charter middle schools designed to serve underserved communities, with the goal of closing achievement gaps and preparing students to succeed in college. KIPP has since expanded its model to include elementary and high…

Post-secondary institutions in British Columbia and elsewhere were forced to react quickly and boldly when the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in early 2020. The pandemic had unforeseen consequences, but it also created opportunities for new approaches to institutional systems and service delivery. This study evaluates the impact of the pandemic on…

Although persisters now represent the largest group of non-graduating high school students, they have received little attention in the research literature, leaving unanswered the question of how persisters differ from dropouts in terms of demographic characteristics, academic preparation, and key life outcomes. Using statewide…