Social mobility, and in particular, intergenerational mobility, can be driven by increased opportunities for extended education. Movement beyond a family's social class will often see positive changes to overall life satisfaction, however, this movement can introduce feelings of alienation. This in turn can lead to detachment either from the…

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…

Artificial intelligence (AI) may be the new-new-norm in a post-pandemic learning environment. There is a growing number of university students using AI like ChatGPT and Bard to support their academic experience. Much of the AI in higher education research to date has focused on academic integrity and matters of authorship; yet, there may be…

High dropout rates in STEM disciplines are certainly among the most crucial challenges that higher education is facing. While prior research has mainly applied an individual-centered approach that has helped identify factors explaining student dropout, an important yet under-examined issue is how those responsible for shaping the academic…

Student sense of belonging is a current challenge to higher education providers, with consistently declining ratings in national surveys. For universities globally, this is a concern linked to student attrition, student satisfaction, and student success. Importantly, low sense of belonging is typically associated with non-traditional learners, and…

This article focuses on student persistence in Higher Education. It examines qualities that enable students to persist in their studies despite the challenges they face, and key factors interplaying with and affecting these qualities. This study utilised the explanatory mixed-methods approach. It comprised a faculty-wide survey which explained the…

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate the impact of a peer-tutoring program on academic performance among first-year students. The sample consisted of 102 first-year students from four-degree programs at a Spanish University. The academic performance was measured through the official student Academic reports. The assignment of the students…

Student engagement is a key prognosticator of success, retention and perseverance in higher education. This study used structural equation modelling to evaluate a gain cycle of future time perspective (FTP), positive emotion and student engagement, derived from the broaden-and-build theory (BBT). A further objective was to examine changes within…

Creating the conditions that foster student engagement, success and retention remains a perennial issue within the higher education sector. Traditionally satisfaction has been prioritised in assessing student success. A more expansive, holistic and ontological perspective of the student experience that takes into account who and what students are…

Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) is acknowledged as one of the key drivers of technological innovation. Malaysian women join the educational pipeline as equals to their male counterparts. Nevertheless, women are persistently under-represented in technology and engineering, but over-represented in other STEM fields. Using…

Given the challenging transition from secondary school into higher education, this quasi-experimental study measured the effects of a pre-academic programme (i.e. before starting at university) on student-faculty interactions, student-peer interactions, sense of belonging, and first-year academic performance. Fifty-eight first-year students…

Despite a nearly 40-year history of research initiatives and interventions to recruit and retain women engineering students, women remain significantly underrepresented in engineering. Given the lack of progress, it seems clear that new lenses on the problem of underrepresentation warrant further attention. Higher education policies are one area…

As part of a longitudinal research effort that examines the influence of social capital on differential persistence and retention among undergraduate engineering majors, this study examines how engineering degree-related social capital differs for first-year engineering students by gender and ethno-racial groups. Social capital is operationalized…

The promise of higher education remains elusive for many Indigenous students in Australia. To date, institutional efforts to improve the persistence and retention of Indigenous students have been largely piecemeal, poorly integrated and designed to remediate skill deficits. Yet, market-led expansion of Australian higher education is driving…

This article analyses the changes in international student mobility from the lens of three overlapping waves spread over seven years between 1999 and 2020. Here a wave is defined by the key events and trends impacting international student mobility within temporal periods. Wave I was shaped by the terrorist attacks of 2001 and enrolment of…