This descriptive/transcendental phenomenological design aimed to understand how working college graduates perceived their college experience, their transition from school to work for workforce integration, and their career alignment to gainful employment. The intended sample was ten working college graduates with bachelor's degrees. However, due…

The purpose of this quantitative study is to test the relationship between degree choice and post-graduate outcomes for students in the United States by describing the relationship between a selected major and post-graduate outcomes including employment sector, salary for women and men. As college costs rise, and enrollments fall for the first…

The Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally (HOPE) scholarship marked a significant advancement in education by offering expanded opportunities for Georgia students earning a high school GPA of 3.00 or higher to attend a University System of Georgia (USG) institution. This quantitative study examined individuals who earned a bachelor's degree…

The purpose of this quantitative ex post facto research study was to determine if, and to what extent, a difference existed in the Federal Graduation Rate (FGR) and Graduation Success Rate (GSR) of African American NCAA D1 FBS football student-athletes for those who had a head coach turnover versus those who did not in the United States. Complex…

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) identified that approximately 1.8 million cybersecurity positions were vacant in 2021 because of a lack of professionals with the required skill sets and who remained in their jobs long enough to contribute to their organizations' cybersecurity needs. Also shown was the rising global…

This dissertation includes three essays on the economics of higher education. In the first chapter, I study the effects of college transfer. Over one-third of college students in the United States transfer between institutions, yet little is known about how transferring affect students' educational and labor market outcomes. Using administrative…

America needs community colleges to be the most adaptive and responsive sector of the higher education system in order to remain competitive in a global marketplace. Employers need community college career technical education (CTE) programs to be responsive to labor force needs and produce competent middle-skilled workers. Policymakers need…

While college students are increasingly mobile across countries, there is limited evidence of these mobile students' impact on local communities in host countries. The purpose of this study is to fill this gap by investigating the impact of international students on local economies in the United States. I examined two overarching research…

This study investigates Agile Education and addresses the need for more empirical data on how graduates experience and describe the effectiveness of their Agile Education when applied in the IT workforce. The widespread adoption of agile methods has increased IT employers' demand for professionals with agile experience and created a gap between…

I study the effect of higher education on lifecycle earnings and focus on three ways in which education may help drive earnings: the effect of higher education on one's skills, the effect on one's ability to accumulate new skills in the future, and the relationship between education and one's likelihood of unemployment. In the first chapter, I…

Education has begun to look beyond the traditional methods of didactic teaching, lectures, and clinical based instruction within their program curricula to address the gap between theoretical and real-life situations (Walker, Langton & Thomson, 2011). Problem Based Learning (PBL) has been seen as an alternative method of instruction that is…

This dissertation investigates how the status and value of the college degree as a credential are constructed and evaluated in response to the changing social demographic compositions of colleges and universities. A large body of scholarship shows that occupations with a higher proportion of women have lower average rewards for both women and…

Many universities and K-12 public school systems express a significant, formal commitment to the ideals of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Relative to the emphasis on DEI in America's educational institutions, however, there has been little research describing DEI trends and evaluating the efficacy of DEI bureaucracies. This three-chapter…

The reform of English programs at Chinese universities had been implemented for decades. The goal of the reform was to adjust the curriculum so the classroom teaching could be more student-centered and market-oriented. Nevertheless, the accomplishments of the reform by Chinese universities are contradictive with some educational policies mandated…

This qualitative case study included a review of the nursing shortage, nursing education, contemporary learners, the LPN and RN, the future of nursing education, online education, and transitions experiences. These topics defined this study by providing the underpinnings to understand the LPN to RN journey. According to the American Association of…