Private master's comprehensive institutions (PMCIs) in the United States navigate pressures to expand college access and equity while striving for prestige in the academic hierarchy. To strive for prestige entails competing for world-class status of greater selectivity, research intensity and resources, but such a pathway to excellence may,…

This qualitative study explores the experiences of Black, low-income parents' access to quality early childhood education (ECE) programs in Georgia. Through in-depth interviews, this study explored how income level impacts Black parents' lived experiences regarding access to quality ECE programs. Implications of this study's findings will benefit…

Richard Allington reviews the nature of the reading achievement gap between students from low-income and high-income families, concluding that the limited access to children's books experienced by children from low-income families lies at the base of the problem. The fact that children from low-income families lose reading achievement every summer…

Socioeconomic status (SES) has been widely argued to be an important predictor of students' learning outcomes; the corollary is that low-SES students face immense challenges in their learning. The present study employed an umbrella review, comprising a thematic review and second-order meta-analysis, of 48 reviews relating SES to student learning…

Background: Early care and education (ECE) has lasting, positive effects on children's school readiness (Phillips et al., 2018; Yoshikawa et al., 2013). Over the past several decades, access to city or state-funded prekindergarten (pre-K) has increased considerably (Friedman-Krauss et al., 2023) with well-documented, positive impacts on child…

Socioeconomic differences among low-income and racially minoritized students may be consequential for understanding the dynamics of school choice--especially in high-poverty and racially segregated urban contexts that are often targeted by school choice policies. Yet school choice research largely focuses on differences between groups and relies…

Given the low price of community college relative to need-based aid, last-dollar "free community college" (i.e., Promise) programs often only marginally reduce students' real costs. Given this reality, some claim that these programs impact students largely through "messaging": information conveying the affordability of…

Ghana is one of the few countries with prior cost-sharing funding approaches to upper secondary education to have rolled out a completely free upper secondary education policy. Whilst the empirical foundation of the emerging body of studies on the policy includes policy makers, implementers and a reliance on policy documents, the perspectives of…

Undermatching continues to create barriers to access to post-secondary opportunities for low-income students from urban public high schools. According to Belasco and Trivette (2015), postsecondary undermatch occurs when students fail to enroll at a college or university that possesses a level of selectivity their academic credentials would permit…

This PACER brief provides RFA's updated analysis of data on students experiencing homelessness in Pennsylvania, highlighting prevalence, challenges with identification, disparities in educational opportunities, and impact on academic outcomes. Our main findings include that: (1) Roughly 2% of students in Pennsylvania were identified as…

The Keystone Education Yields Success (KEYS) program is a welfare-to-work program in Pennsylvania meant to promote financial independence through education. Across the community colleges in the state of Pennsylvania, the KEYS program has often allowed financially disadvantaged students to succeed on par with - and often surpass - their non-KEYS…

"All In: Towards Tangible Solutions for Equity and Inclusion in Education" showcases promising practices that were successfully implemented to ensure that inclusive education really does include all children, so that the most marginalized learners -- including children with disabilities, children who are out of school, children living in…

Poverty alleviation through education is counted as a critical move in China's campaign against poverty, aiming to elevate the education levels of the underprivileged population, halt the intergenerational transmission of poverty, and assist social equity and economic development. This article is a review of the evolution of China's policies on…

Around the world each year, large sums of money are expended in helping students access higher education institutions (HEIs), but there is remarkably little evidence to show whether this investment is effective or not. Here we use data from a UK university to investigate the relationship between financial support and the continuation of students…

The STEM Transfer Partnership (STP) initiative seeks to create systemic change within STEM degree pathways in Washington through collaboration between teams of faculty and staff from nine pairs of two-year and four-year institutions across the state. These teams are supported by Community College Research Initiatives (CCRI) to work together to…