How do educators reconcile the growing college-for-all norm--the notion that all students should pursue college--with the diverse needs of students in urban settings? What is the impact on Black students across social-class background? Using interviews and fieldwork with teachers, counselors, and diverse Black students in a large Californian high…

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which began in 2012 through an Obama executive order, provides individuals who entered the country illegally or overstayed visas as minors with work permits and protection from deportation. Of the approximately 11 million undocumented people in the United States, 690,000 hold DACA permits. They are…

California community colleges make higher education accessible for all; however, nearly half its students fail to achieve their goal of degree completion. Based upon the recommendations of the Student Success Task Force, the California legislature passed the Seymour-Campbell Student Success Act of 2012, requiring that all incoming community…

Community college students often lack an academic plan to guide their choices of coursework to achieve their educational goals, in part because counseling departments typically lack the capacity to advise students at scale. This randomized controlled trial tests the impact of guaranteed access to one of two alternative counseling sessions (group…

Guided by the frameworks of college-conocimiento and the cooling out function, this study examined the college choice process of Latina/o/x students who attended an under-resourced urban high school. Data for this study consisted of interviews with ten institutional agents, two oral history interviews with 34 Latina/o/x students, and observation…

Educators, researchers, and policymakers across the political spectrum agree that the nation must send more of its young people to college and find ways to help them graduate--especially young people from low-income families. To that end, in 2010, MDRC and a group of partners developed College Match, an innovative school-based college advising…

This report shows how state leaders are using technological advances to improve the use of data in five critical areas: (1) Helping economic and workforce developers, businesses, and colleges to reduce the high costs resulting from uninformed education and workforce decisions; (2) Assisting college leaders in making program-related decisions that…

Background/Context: The demands of military family life are great, especially within the context of war. Yet, because less than 1 percent of the population serves, the unique needs and circumstances facing the more than two million children from military families are often absent from our collective consciousness. In the past decade, public…

The purpose of this qualitative exploratory case study was to examine the high school counselors' perception of their ability to influence low socioeconomic students' postsecondary enrollment decisions in seven Title I high schools in southern California. Perna and Thomas' Student Success model and the Delivery System of the American School…

Many high school students are eligible for college but they do not go, or they attend a less demanding postsecondary institution. Their problems are twofold--either (1) they lack the counseling and support structures necessary to apply to college, or (2) they lack the counseling and support structures that enable them to apply to the kind of…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify and describe to what degree foster care students perceive that the elements of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) affect their academic performance in postsecondary education. In addition, it was the purpose of this study to identify the perceived impacts of internal and external influences on…

This dissertation investigated community college students' perceptions about educational counseling, its value, and its relationship with academic and social integration into the college environment. In an attempt to explore students' perceptions, a quantitative study was conducted at four California community colleges. The survey was distributed…

This study followed all freshman community college students in California who had demonstrated the intent to transfer from 1996, 1997, and 1998. Outcomes were assessed for each of the three entering cohorts after six years (2002-2004) and students were linked with their high schools of origin and the 4-year colleges to which they transferred. The…

In its analysis of more than 15,000 high school transcripts, the Education Trust-West found that non-college-bound students tend to take a weak academic load and disconnected electives. As a result, far too many students--most often low-income students and students of color--are bound for low-level jobs, prepared for neither college nor career.…

It has been well established that the high schools students attend contribute significantly to how well they do in college, and even if they choose to attend college at all (Lee & Frank, 1990). Low performing high schools tend to under-prepare their students for post-secondary education and contribute to the very high percentages of students…