Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs) are colleges and universities across the United States and U.S. Territories enrolling significant percentages of racially minoritized undergraduate students or created with the explicit purpose of serving specific populations of racially minoritized students under various programs created by U.S. Congress (U.S.…

Experiencing transnational mobility during education and training is a major boost in the life of many young people. It helps them grow personally and academically, it broadens their social networks and develops their intercultural and language skills. Learner mobility also impacts education systems and individual educational institutions, causing…

American higher education is nearly four centuries old. But in the decades after World War II, as government and social support surged and enrollments exploded, the role of colleges and universities in American society changed dramatically. Roger Geiger provides the most complete and in-depth history of this remarkable transformation, taking…

Crushing student debt, rapidly eroding state funding, faculty embroiled in speech controversies, a higher-education market disrupted by online competition--today's headlines suggest that universities' power to advance knowledge and shape American society is rapidly declining. But Steven Brint, a renowned analyst of academic institutions, has…

Community colleges are a unique part of the American higher education system that promote access and opportunities for many students who might not otherwise attend a college or university. The purpose of this article is to address community colleges in three parts: their historical relevance, their organisational mission and structure and their…

Seventy-five years after the publication of Abraham Maslow's seminal theory on the importance of basic needs (Maslow, 1943), it is now understood that food, housing, and security also matter for college students' learning and success. Sara Goldrick-Rab's (2016) "Paying the Price" cast a spotlight on basic needs insecurity in college,…

More states, school districts and schools are exploring how competency-based pathways can help far more students reach and exceed the knowledge and skills they need to graduate from high school prepared to succeed in college and the workplace. How do competency-based pathways help students do so? In this report are the stories of three students…

Community colleges have made great strides in advancing student success and completion during the last decade. But not all students have benefited from these efforts equally. According to the Lumina Foundation, the postsecondary attainment rate for adults in the United States is around 40 percent. Yet, there are still large gaps in attainment…

The release of institution-level earnings information as part of the Obama Administration's new College Scorecard data has already spawned new "value-added" rankings based on the economic outcomes of students who attended similar institutions. These emerging rankings are an improvement on simple unadjusted rankings, but the wide variance…

Community and technical colleges are known as "Democracy's colleges." They are grounded in the core American value that all people deserve the opportunity to move up in the world, regardless of where they are from, what obstacles they face and where they need to start. At a time when college education is the ticket to a middle-class…

This paper discusses the ways in which mature students orientate themselves towards the future in making decisions to access higher education (HE). Their narratives connect their past, often difficult, educational and personal lives to their future aspirations and to their current experiences in further education (FE) and HE. The research was part…

Growing Science, Technology, Education, and Mathematics (STEM) talent Washington MESA--Mathematics Engineering Science Achievement--helps under-represented community college students excel in school and ultimately earn STEM bachelor's degrees. MESA has two key programs: one for K-12 students, and the other for community and technical college…

This paper describes the programs and services colleges have in place to facilitate student mobility, and documents the main regional and provincial/territorial mechanisms to facilitate transfer of post-secondary credits from one institution to another. Because there are many terms used to describe elements of post-secondary transferability and…

In this article, we discuss the use of administrative data from schools, colleges and universities, and other public and private agencies and organizations for tracking students through their educational pathways. We focus on existing data collection systems that can be used to study successful postsecondary education transitions, including both…

In recent years there has been a significant growth in the number of international students. In several developed countries the inflow of foreign tertiary students has become a significant source of income for higher education (HE) providers and the economy as a whole. This net inflow of foreign students has been indirectly and, more recently,…