The effects of childhood adversity on health and socioemotional outcomes have received increasing examination in recent years. However, the impact of childhood adversity on academic outcomes has garnered little attention. This study aimed to explore the effects of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on college graduation rates and whether…

The purpose of this study was to examine the predictive power of Academic and Learning Analytics models on the persistence, retention, and graduation rates for students enrolled in higher education institutions in the United States. Specifically, this study is concerned with the relationships between the present usage of Academic and Learning…

Colleges have increasingly turned to predictive analytics to target at-risk students for additional support. Most of the predictive analytic applications in higher education are proprietary, with private companies offering little transparency about their underlying models. We address this lack of transparency by systematically comparing two…

Employee turnover continues to be discussed as an outcome in Human Resources (HR), but comparatively few studies have examined the relationship between turnover as the independent variable and institutional outcomes. Although the call to HR practitioners has often been made over the past 20 years regarding the importance of tying HR programs and…

With state resources for higher education under constant pressure, it is critical to understand how to maximize institutional performance while being economical with resource allocation. Future workforce demands will call for an increasing number of those entering the workforce to have some form of higher education instruction, beyond their…

In this dissertation, I use data from Chile to study the determinants of schooling trajectories. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on higher education, Chapter 3 on secondary education, and Chapter 4 on teachers. Chapter 1 explores the role of a socio-emotional ability, self-efficacy, in understanding why students with comparable qualifications transit…

Nathanael Okpych and Mark Courtney review barriers to completing a college degree for young adults with foster care histories seeking post-secondary education. Their longitudinal approach evaluates students with foster care histories attending 2- and 4-year colleges and compares outcomes with low-income first-generation college students over a…

Prior research studies associated the employment of part-time faculty with student degree and/or certificate completion (Benjamin, 2002; Ehrenberg & Zhang, 2005; Jacoby, 2006; Leslie & Gappa, 2002; Umbach, 2008; Umbach & Wawrzynski, 2005). To date, institutional-level data have been utilized to investigate whether such employment…

Prior research on trends in educational inequality has focused chiefly on changing gaps in educational attainment by family income or parental occupation. In contrast, this contribution provides the first assessment of trends in educational attainment by family wealth and suggests that we should be at least as much concerned about growing wealth…

Public Law 105-244 of the 1998 Higher Education Act Amendments established that proprietary institutions must derive at least 90% (the "90/10 rule") of their revenue from sources other than federal student aid (Title IV funding). Schools that violate the 90/10 rule for 2 consecutive years lose access to Title IV funding (U.S. Department…

Within a challenging environment of financial hardships and budget cuts, higher education institutions have been struggling to maintain the balance between quality and productivity using the available resources while answering to calls for more accountability and proof of effective and efficient institutional performance. This study explored the…

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…

In a nation where monolingualism predominates, heritage language (HL) has been downplayed as less important in educational contexts in the U.S. Disproportionately little attention has been given to the role of HL in language minority (LM) students' attendance to postsecondary education (PSE) (cf. Brutt-Griffler, Janina, and Manka Varghese, eds.…

Previous studies have shown that state performance funding policies do not increase baccalaureate degree production, but higher education scholarship lacks a rigorous, quantitative analysis of the unintended consequences of performance funding. In this article, we use difference-in-differences estimation with fixed effects to evaluate performance…

This examination of the current status of multicultural education among California community colleges emerged from a perspective that the inclusion of multicultural education has become a major goal of California's leaders within the past five years. The literature revealed minority students tend to have lower retention rates because they become…