This study explores the historical construction of student volunteering in higher education (HE) and the implications of this process for present-day organisational structures and common understandings. This critical-historical analysis, which focuses on the Israeli HE field, draws from archival data spanning the 1970s-2000s, from two leading…

Preparing pre-service students to teach agricultural mechanics is a difficult task due to the career pathway including a great variety of topics (Byrd et al., 2015). This study examined the trend in requirements in 1862 land-grant universities for number of courses, course credit hours, and course topics related to agricultural mechanics, as well…

Florida's 2009 Excess Credit legislation created a tuition penalty structure for undergraduate college students who attempted credit hours above a determined threshold to incentivize efficient graduation. Due to the structure of the law, there are advantages for students who complete collegiate credit via acceleration during high school. As such,…

Purpose: Higher education, as a field of study, is one of the few programmatic areas that offer two doctoral degrees: The Doctor of Education (EdD) and the Doctor of Philosophy (PhD). In the United States, the two degrees are often conflated. Conversations, to this point, have done more to contribute to the theoretical debate than to operationally…

Several states, including Texas, have implemented an "excess semester credit hours (ESCH)" policy. State ESCH policies assess a fee to students at public institutions when they exceed a set number of lifetime cumulative credit hours (e.g. students with more than the 120 credit hours needed for a bachelor's degree). In this article, we…

Excess hours laws are among credit-based accountability measures implemented by several state legislatures in the United States since 1993 to incentivize students to complete their baccalaureate degree programs with fewer excess credit hours. An analysis of the nature and scope of similar educational policies in the national context is provided in…

This is the third brief summarizing results from the longitudinal analysis of the Transfer Opportunity Project (TOP). TOP, funded by a grant from the Institute for Education Sciences (IES), explores the possible factors contributing to the low percentage of community college students who go on to earn bachelor's degrees. The project uses a…

This essay identifies six common institutional barriers to student completion and offers recommendations to remove them. The barriers are: (a) confusing degree requirements, (b) courses not available when needed, (c) unnecessary registration holds, (d) course credits of transfer students not counted toward degree, (e) financial aid policies that…

There are longstanding concerns regarding whether remedial coursework at the college or university level is the most effective and efficient way to increase student success for students deemed not "college ready" upon entry to college. Requiring students to complete these courses (often non-credit-bearing) prior to becoming eligible for…