The transition to higher education is a topic of concern for educators around the world. In fact, the shift to a more competitive educational environment can negatively impact students' academic self-concept, which, in turn, might lead to lower persistence and less adaptive educational decisions. To examine how psychology students adapt to the…

This paper sheds new light on horizontal stratification in higher education by studying, in the Israeli context, the choice of institution and field of study of sons and daughters of nonacademic economically established parents. These youngsters wish to reproduce their parents' economic capital, but also to legitimize their social position by…

The link between noncognitive skills and achievement is well established. There is much less evidence on how these skills are developed and transmitted to students, especially as it relates to girls that attend nonelite schools in non-Western settings. Drawing on insights from girl students attending an urban school in Ghana, this paper…

This study leverages human capital theory to identify the correlates of expected returns on investment in higher education at the level of institutions. We leverage estimates of average ROI in post-secondary education among more than 400 baccalaureate degree conferring colleges and universities to understand the correlates of a relatively new…

As the primary transmitter of advanced skills and incubators of new knowledge, colleges and universities play a crucial role in modern economies. In the U.S., the higher education sector consists of a diverse set of institutions. Public, private non-profit, and private for- profit organizations coexist in this market. Although large research…

This paper describes two studies that explore students' beliefs about critical and creative learning at two universities, and considers the implications of those beliefs in comparison to the universities' stated education goals. One is a mixed method study of students at a top university in Korea, and the second is a comparative study between the…

Learning to program is a complex task, and the impact of different pedagogical approaches to teach this skill has been hard to measure. This study examined the performance data of seven cohorts of students (N = 1168) learning programming under three different pedagogical approaches. These pedagogical approaches varied either in the length of the…

Quantitative increases tell a partial story about the quality of women's participation in higher education. Women students' reporting of sexual harassment has been noteworthy in a recent study that I directed on widening participation in higher education in Ghana and Tanzania. The hierarchical and gendered power relations within universities have…

The purpose of this person-oriented, 5-wave longitudinal study was to examine the trajectories of educational expectations from adolescence to young adulthood in the context of the expectancy-value theory (Eccles et al., 1983). Altogether, 853 (48% female; M age = 16 years) Finnish adolescents reported their educational expectation, 1st in the…

Despite near universal acceptance in the value of higher education for individuals and society, college persistence rates in 4-year and community colleges are low. Only 57% of students who began college at a 4-year institution in 2001 had completed a bachelor's degree by 2007, and only 28% of community college students who started school in 2005…

This paper draws on the theoretical resources offered by feminist scholarship to enquire into the discourse of the intellectual and how women do being an academic. My starting points are threefold: Val Hey's interrogation of Butler's work and her emphasis on the importance of sociality; Carrie Paechter's exploration of the available personal sets…

Persistence and retention have been studied extensively in higher education, but little research has been conducted on these areas in religiously affiliated institutions. The present study was designed to examine factors that influence the intentions of students to persist from their freshmen to sophomore year in private, religiously affiliated,…

Previous research has indicated significant variation between schools in the proportion of their students who go on to higher education. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the specific school characteristics influencing application and entry to tertiary education. This paper sets out to analyse the individual and school factors…

Recent advances in neuroimaging and genetics technologies have enhanced our understanding of neurodevelopmental disorders in adults. The authors in this volume not only discuss such advances as they apply to adults with learning disorders, but also address their translation into clinical practice. One cluster of chapters addresses developmental…

Two studies explored the experience and performance of students at Williams College in three-person groups that were homogeneous or heterogeneous in rated academic ability. In accord with hypotheses from Festinger's (1954) social comparison theory, students in academically homogeneous groups had more positive experiences and performed better on…