It has become increasingly difficult to succeed in the U.S. workforce with only a high school diploma. While 75% of the middle-class workforce had only a high school education in the 1970s, that percentage dropped to below 40% by 2007. An estimated two-thirds of all jobs in 2020 will require some postsecondary training, up from just a quarter of…

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Labor invited postsecondary institutions to participate in an experiment to learn how federal financial aid might be used to cover the costs of prior learning assessment (PLA). PLA is the process of evaluating a student's prior workplace and experiential learning for academic credit. While the experiment is still…

Through a one year-long, qualitative study of welfare-to-work students, this study investigates the developing epistemologies of women enrolled in a community college CalWORKs program. We investigate how poverty as a macro-environment and the community college as a micro-environment influence participants' epistemological development. Findings…

The main goals of this implementation study were to: (1) examine how the grant recipients were implementing the changes set forth in their grant proposals; (2) identify initial barriers to implementation of grant activities; (3) identify catalysts that aided in goal attainment and/or partnership development; and (4) consider the sustainability of…