Students with chronic medical conditions often experience barriers to academic progress, including impact of disease and treatment, increased school absence, and altered expectations of teachers and parents. School belonging is an important element of academic success and can be promoted by positive relationships, structure, and support in the…

Improving graduation rates is one of the biggest missions in many universities across the country and it is surely the case on the campus of this institution. The work here presents a statistical tool box to use early academic performance as a predictor for graduation with logistic regression and machine learning techniques. The methods described…

This three-study dissertation investigated how socioeconomic factors and policies are associated with educational outcomes for undocumented youth and, in one of the papers, to what extent education and employment outcomes intersect. Guided by the specific questions of each study, the three papers take different theoretical and methodological…

One of the most important issues in any educational environment is identifying factors that promote academic success. A plethora of research on such factors exists across most academic fields, involving a wide range of student demographics, and the definition of student success varies across the range of studies published. The analysis in this…

National efforts to transform undergraduate biology education call for research experiences to be an integral component of learning for all students. Course-based undergraduate research experiences, or CUREs, have been championed for engaging students in research at a scale that is not possible through apprenticeships in faculty research…

Honors directors and deans know or presume that retention and graduation rates of honors students substantially exceed those of non-honors students. In our research, we have attempted to better determine what portion of this success is attributable to the academic and other benefits of honors programs as opposed to the background characteristics…

As the U.S. population ages and policy changes emerge, such as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, the U.S. will experience a significant shortage of Registered Nurses (RNs). Many colleges and universities are attempting to increase the size of nursing cohorts to respond to this imminent shortage. Notwithstanding a 2.6%…

The purpose of this study was to understand why graduation rates of African American male students from four-year historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) within a six-year period were not on par with those of other races and ethnicities and, in particular, whether the reasons African American male students drop out rather than persist…

Graduation outcomes are analyzed at public and private baccalaureate colleges and universities in the United States. The purpose is to determine the effect of institutional characteristics on a binary indicator of college graduation. The effect of the percentage of Pell grant recipients on graduation outcomes is of primary interest, controlling…

This study examines the institutional factors associated with student loan default. When a college has more than 30% of its students default on their loans, then the institution faces federal sanctions that could make them ineligible from participating in the federal student loan program. Using Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System…

Judicial sanctions are used by drug courts to encourage clients to comply with program requirements. However, few studies have explored the application of sanctions in drug courts or the relationship between sanctions and drug court graduation. This article reports the results of a study of sanctions as applied in a drug court in southwest…

What are the socioeconomic implications of the time allocation decisions made by low-income adolescents? The way adolescents allocate their time between schooling, labor and leisure has important implications for their education attainment, college aspirations, job opportunities and future earnings. This study focuses on adolescents and young…

The CSU (California State University) Chancellor's Office received a grant from the Lumina Foundation to engage in a year of planning activities to increase productivity within the CSU system. The grant is part of the Making Opportunity Affordable (MOA) initiative of the Lumina Foundation that is aimed at improving higher education productivity…

Cox (1972) proposed a discrete-time survival model that is somewhat analogous to the proportional hazards model for continuous time. Efron (1988) showed that this model can be estimated using ordinary logistic regression software, and Singer and Willett (1993) provided a detailed illustration of a particularly flexible form of the model that…