College success courses (CSCs), or orientation courses, are offered by community colleges and universities to facilitate the success of first-time-in-college students. Primarily, these courses are designed to address students' nonacademic deficiencies, such as weak study habits and poor organizational skills, and to familiarize students with…

Although burnout is a known risk for practitioners, some social work students may experience burnout in the classroom as a result of role conflict from balancing academics with employment. Higher rates of burnout occur in other disciplines in employed students, even higher than in professionals, because of the stress of shifting priorities between…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between attachment style, shyness, shame, and college persistence and grade point average. While considerable research was conducted to examine these variables in children, less is known about how these variables interact in a college setting. This study used a quantitative,…

This study examined the effects of unsubsidized federal Stafford loans on six-year degree attainment at 4-year colleges and universities in the U.S., and how these differentially impact students across income groups. For this, nationally representative data from the Beginning Postsecondary Students (BPS:04/09) and the Integrated Postsecondary…

Careers in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields have many benefits, including decent salaries, a strong employment outlook, and high job satisfaction. Unfortunately, workers with disabilities are underrepresented in the STEM fields. This practice brief describes a program designed to support college students with…

Background: Student success in a baccalaureate nursing program is of utmost importance at a southern College of Nursing (CON).CON faculty wanted to understand better what academic/ social risk factors attributed to attrition in the first year of the nursing program. The purpose of this study was to determine academic and social risk factors…

In recent years there has been considerable interest in how many learners complete MOOCs, and what factors during usage can predict completion. Others, however, have argued that many learners never intend to complete MOOCs, and take MOOCs for other reasons. There has been qualitative research into why learners take MOOCs, but the link between…

This study employs the notion of bridging social capital to investigate the extent to which different forms and quantity of interactions with educators predict intentions to persist in engineering among a sample of Latina/o engineering majors from five public 4-year institutions in the United States. Different forms of capital were effective for…

The 2012/17 Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study (BPS:12/17), conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) at the U.S. Department of Education, is the second follow-up of students who began postsecondary education in the 2011-12 academic year. BPS:12/17 draws from the 2011-12 National Postsecondary Student Aid…

This study examines the relationship between the working conditions of student teaching schools and changes in student teachers' planned persistence in teaching. Planned persistence (and a related construct, initial commitment) is an important predictor of initial entry (Rots, Aelterman, Vlerick, & Vermeulen, 2007) and actual persistence in…

Supplemental Instruction (SI), a higher-education academic support program, targets challenging college courses and uses peer-led review sessions to develop academic skills, improve grades, influence persistence, and ultimately increase student retention (Arendale, 2001). The goals of this study were twofold: to determine if differences existed in…

An increasing number of Christian colleges are adding football programs as a way to boost enrollment among men and ethnic minorities. No systematic study has attempted to measure these outcomes. We tested the relationship of football to percent male, percent non-White, and first-year retention at 125 U.S. colleges and universities affiliated with…

To examine the relationships between beginning public 2-year students' academic progress and labor market participation, this report uses data from the 2012/14 Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study (BPS:12/14). The report explores the demographics, enrollment intensity, and 3-year attainment and persistence of students who started in…

This qualitative study describes the experiences of 16 successful first-generation college students (FGCS) utilizing a theoretical lens, informed significantly by bioecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), which guided our qualitative analyses of interview transcripts to examine the activities, roles, and relationships of these students…

This study is an extension of two previous studies that provided profiles of persisting STEM majors overall (regardless of academic performance) and persisting STEM majors who earned semester GPAs of 3.0 or higher (Westrick, 2016, 2017). Using data from 25 four-year institutions, this study compared the mean ACT assessment scores, HSGPAs, and ACT…