The purpose of this project was to impact the participants' spiritual formation with an emphasis on cultural identity with a select group of White Christian college students at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan through a three-session small group that focused on spiritual formation, cultural identity development, and practicing spiritual…

This study examines what undergraduate students say they learn about engaging with difference and across cultures in the Michigan Union and the Trotter Multicultural Center at the University of Michigan, a historically white institution. The University of Michigan is a historically white institution because of its majority of white students,…

The extent to which pandemic-induced public school enrollment declines will persist is unclear. Student-level data from Michigan through fall 2021 yields three relevant findings. First, relative to pre-pandemic trends, fall 2021 enrollment had partially recovered for low-income, Black, and Hispanic students, but had declined further for…

Residential segregation accounts for most school segregation. School choice policies have the potential to decrease school segregation by allowing students to attend schools outside their neighborhoods. However, some research indicates that these policies can also contribute to increased segregation, likely due to differences in access to choice…

As schools across the US and around the world closed their physical buildings to stop the spread of COVID-19, students, teachers, families, and communities grappled with the shift to online learning. While emerging research examines how educators navigated this shift, little is known about how students experienced schooling as the pandemic…

Seven decades after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case "Brown vs. Board of Education," Michigan students of color continue to face devastating educational inequities in deeply under-resourced public schools. Today, they are far more likely to be enrolled in Michigan public schools with the highest concentrations of poverty, where they…

Soft-skill competencies are essential for successful careers. Yet, research shows that graduates often lack soft skill competencies. Reasons may be there is no set list of soft skills, soft skills are subjective, and they are challenging to teach and assess. Historically, there has been inconsistent funding for soft skill training in the U.S. for…

Promise programs are proliferating across the United States, with wide variation in their design. Using national data on 33 Promise programs affecting single, 2-year colleges, this study examines program effects on first-time, full-time college enrollments of students by race/ethnicity and gender classification. Results suggest Promise programs…

In this study, I investigated how student publications portrayed whiteness as the dominant feature of the campus environment between 1945 and 1965 among the member institutions of a consortium of elite U.S. Midwestern liberal arts colleges located in rural and industrial towns across Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania. These…

It has long been recognized that Black and Latinx students are underrepresented at America's top public universities and thus deprived of access to the institutions with the best graduation rates and career outcomes. Much less understood is whether these students at least have equitable access to their local community colleges, which are supposed…

This exploratory, descriptive study examined trends associated with Kalamazoo Promise (KPromise) student stop out, reenrollment, and persistence to a credential upon reenrollment. For the 2006-2017 cohorts, 78% were retained from first to second year. Inferential models suggested that first-year stop out was mainly correlated to students' high…

During the 2015-2016 school year, 1.3 million students nationwide experienced homelessness. Yet hardships like homelessness represent dynamic rather than static states, and so annual figures understate the cumulative risk that students face over time. Moreover, despite recent efforts to understand eviction and foreclosure as exploitative and…

Light-touch social psychological interventions have gained considerable attention for their potential to improve academic outcomes for underrepresented and/or disadvantaged students in postsecondary education. While findings from previous interventions have demonstrated positive effects for racial and ethnic minority and first-generation students…

During a period of high expectations and accountability for public schools, some minority administrators have chosen to work in predominantly White schools. The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the professional and personal experiences of minority administrators located in predominantly White suburban school districts in one…

Experiencing an early pubertal transition has been shown to increase the risk for internalizing and externalizing outcomes among girls. It is less clear how the expectations of other individuals can be critical determinants of vulnerability for early developers. This study used an experimental design to examine whether the expectations of teachers…