According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 125,485 Black women earned a bachelor's degree in 2019 in comparison to 70,909 in 1999. As the number of Black women on college campuses have increased, the number of Black women in senior leadership roles have remained stagnant. It is important for higher education institutions to find…

Experiences of Black women in college are often lost in conversations about college students. Although underrepresented students are highly researched, the focus is usually on Black males and White females. This research identifies the obstacles encountered by Black women at predominately white institutions on their pursuit of a college degree,…

A "critical access point in the STEM pipeline for Latinx students and other students of color" (Herrera et al., 2018), community colleges provide a seminal breeding ground for academic pursuits (Bahr et al., 2017). However, how personal networks influence STEM pathways of two-year college students remains largely unexplored. This mixed…

This singular holistic case study examined the experience of a Black pregnant mother pursuing doctoral studies in a science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) field at a predominantly white flagship institution in the southern United States. We employed the tenets of critical race feminism in this study to demonstrate the ways in which…

This narrative inquiry focuses on the coaching and mentoring experiences of a Graduate Research Assistant (GRA) within an informal mentoring program in a College of Education at a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). The study examines the impact of mentoring and coaching on the GRA's professional development utilizing Yosso's Community Cultural…

The purpose of this intrinsic case study was to explore the conceptual knowledge of engineering faculty regarding STEM identity and how they promote undergraduate women's STEM identity in the classroom. Interviews with faculty were grounded in Collins' contextual model of Black student STEM identity and were analyzed inductively and deductively.…

Many studies on higher education access have focused on challenges faced by the civilian population. Indeed, there are many obstacles that people face when seeking to enter certificate- and degree-granting programs, including affordability, inequitable admission standards, and family and work demands on their time. Veterans, however, have access…

Using a comparative perspective, this study explores determinants of college STEM diversity in gender, focusing on female youth in India as an under-represented sub-group in STEM. Much of the current literature understand female under-representation in college STEM as a result of individual traits, e.g., STEM self-efficacy. Yet recent qualitative…

Individuals with a growth mindset believe they have the ability to learn (Dweck, 2006). The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to understand the shared lived experiences connected to growth mindset, self-efficacy, and grit in a population of undergraduate students at a private women's university in the Midwest who participate…

Higher education has long recognized women's numerous challenges in undergraduate engineering programs. Several factors contribute to this lack of belonging, including a lack of diversity among student populations, microaggressions, prejudices, and traditions still rooted in male customs. An overlooked factor that may help foster a sense of…

Female-focused, grassroots communities purporting to help women learn to code are popping up in a variety of settings, indicating the motivation on the part of the participants to evade male-dominated settings while learning. However, little is known about how these groups function as an activity system. With current technology enabling the…

At the turn of the century, St. Louis' Negro females faced an education desert. Opportunities for informal instruction were scarce, particularly for those in lower socio-economic brackets (Anderson 1988). The 1911 opening of the St. Louis Phyllis Wheatley-YWCA (PW-YWCA) became a beacon of hope and a center of educational respite for those young…

The emergence of terrorism against girls' education continues to prevent a large number of girls from attending school. The imminent fear of terrorist attacks also infiltrates the female teaching fraternity through their perceived job risk, job anxiety, and death sensitivity. This study echoes the female teachers' vulnerability through time-lagged…

As a collective, women's experience in higher education has been disparate and differential to some men's experience over the last two centuries, fundamentally based on the societal influences of the time. In the formative years of higher education women attended higher education institutions for social stratification reasons or for marital choice…

Student enrollment data show an increase in the number of women returning to college after employment. Adult women returning to college are more likely to juggle other roles, including mother, spouse, caregiver, and community member while attending college. Higher education administrators have insufficient knowledge about what efforts are…