Understanding an institution's culture helps new students develop accurate expectations for their college experience. This study explored how colleges and universities communicate their culture to students through emails. Analysis of institutional emails to incoming students uncovered taken-for-granted beliefs about the institution's culture and…

This study explored student success practices of select community colleges as implemented during students' pre- and post-matriculation periods and whether those colleges have united them into a cohesive design. The pre- and post-matriculation timeframe has been identified as the most critical segment of the student's academic career (Acevedo-Gil…

Purpose: This study aims to explore the use and perceptions of social media among university students before and during their transition from high school to higher education. Design/methodology/approach: This exploratory, cross-sectional study uses an online survey of 312 undergraduate students at a large public research university in the USA.…

College access programs have been created to provide students of color opportunities to attend college. The Posse Foundation selects promising urban high school students to attend highly selective colleges and universities across the country. College success is dependent on a variety of factors, two of which are successful social and academic…

Enrollment offices deploy various outreach methods including mailings, brochures, phone calls, and email campaigns. For these undergraduate admissions offices, working with high school students creates opportunities to shift the enrollment approach every academic year. Evolving admissions strategy created a chance to change the print marketing…

Framed by family engagement frameworks, this study presents four types of interactions college access professionals (CAPs) have with the families of underrepresented college-going students - inconsistent communication, transactional exchanges, student-family mediation, and trusting relationships - to explore the nature of family-educator…

Across the country, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) students appear to be academically successful, completing high school at 95.9 percent (NCES, 2011). However, upon disaggregation of data, AAPI's ethnic subgroups such as Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander (SEAPI) students in Oakland, CA are dropping out at an alarming rate of 50…

Although more students with disabilities are attending university than ever before, many still have difficulties with the transition from high school. Transition research has extensively examined the factors and barriers that support or hinder successful transitions for students with disabilities. However, there has been little explicit focus on…

Purpose: This paper aims to propose and examine the relationship between students' perception of service quality and dimensions and their academic achievement. Design/methodology/approach: Based on the resource-based view, a conceptual relationship between service quality and dimensions and academic achievement is proposed and tested with a sample…

Despite the shift from an elite to a mass higher education (HE) system in the UK, participation between students with Business Technology Education Council (BTEC) and Advanced-Level (A-level) qualifications remains unequal. The data presented here is taken from a longitudinal narrative inquiry funded by the Economic and Social Research Council…

This study aimed to explore the relationship between high school transition preparation and student involvement and integration in college among first-year college students with disabilities. One hundred fifty-eight freshmen with disabilities were recruited from a southeastern university in U.S. The findings reveal that high school transition…

Few studies have examined the experiences of community college students who are or were in foster care. Consequently, relatively little is known about why young people in foster care choose to enroll in community college, what happens to those young people once they enroll, or whether they are receiving the supports they need to achieve their…

Although college access has increased, first-generation college students are still less likely to enroll in postsecondary education, and when they do enroll, are more likely to attend less selective schools compared to their peers whose parents are college-educated. In order to understand how first-generation students end up where they do, we must…

The purpose of this narrative inquiry was to re-story the experiences of a first-year music teacher with regard to race and class. Johny was a first-year high school guitar teacher in the southwestern United States who identified as Hispanic and was raised in a family with a lower income. He was also a first-generation college student whose path…

International students encounter academic and social adjustments different than those of their domestic peers. Of particular concern is language proficiency, specifically students' investment in continual language development throughout university study. In the current article, I present a comparative case study of two Chinese freshmen (Jenn,…