The rising cost of higher education has led to increased tuition costs for students and their families, forcing more students to secure larger amounts of debt to finance their educational pursuits. Although scholars have explored how student loan debt accumulation influences higher education persistence and graduation, an unexplored area of higher…

Do older community college students build momentum toward graduation differently than their younger peers? One-third of students in community colleges are 25 years of age or older, and these students tend to have lower rates of graduation than their younger peers. Yet, we know little about how the factors that influence college graduation differ…

This report provides insights that can help colleges and universities understand how to best serve their students. These findings present a student perspective on the challenges and factors affecting their motivation to succeed, along with directions on how institutions can respond with timely and relevant actions. The findings in this report are…

Our initial impetus for this project stems from the development of UNCP's Indigenous Cultures & Communities (ICC) graduation requirement. We recognize the efforts of individual faculty representing disciplines in the arts, education, humanities, library, and nursing to redesign class activities and courses. Our purpose is to share models and…

Terminal efficiency is an indicator that evaluates the productivity of a higher education institution and reflects a crucial aspect of the quality of its offered programmes. This study aimed to determine the successful graduation of undergraduate students from a dental school at a Peruvian university over six years, using the terminal efficiency…

In November 2024, the New York State Board of Regents issued the "Vision to Transform New York State Graduation Requirements," a plan for high school education reform. To understand the context for this reform, this issue brief discusses New York's levels of student performance and state education spending, as well as a brief history of…

We describe an intentionally designed, cross-disciplinary curriculum that promotes a broad humanistic understanding of the process of science, and how this curriculum supported graduation in science and mathematics. Combining the expertise of philosophers, sociologists, and social psychologists with that of scientists, this cross-disciplinary…

This study examines the influence of Black faculty representation on the graduation rates of Black students, with a particular focus on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Although HBCUs are only a small fraction of U.S. higher education institutions, they play an outsized role in the academic and economic success of Black…

In higher education, many students do not complete their studies within the term allotted. A Dutch university implemented an intervention aimed to reduce this form of academic procrastination. The intervention consisted of three measures: (1) requiring students to acquire all first-year credits within their first year in university, (2) reducing…

The purpose of this non-experimental, correlational quantitative study was to compare the graduation rates of first-time, full-time students with disabilities to those of first-time, full-time students in the general population at the participating university. The sample used for analysis was full-time, first-time students entering between 2015…

Despite the growing population of Latina/o students in the United States, those who are entering college are not graduating at the same rate as their white counterparts. The six-year Hispanic student graduation rate was 8% lower than that of white students (U.S. Census Bureau, 2020). The Latina/o educational attainment gap still exists and…

There has been a notable increase in the number of first-generation students pursuing a college degree. However, there is a mismatch between the number of first-generation students entering college and the number of them continuing their mission through college. Given the college completion disparity for first-generation students, it is essential…

Postsecondary education is vital to thrive, not just survive. Eighty percent of good-paying jobs require postsecondary education, and 56 percent require a bachelor's degree or higher. While the nation's high school graduation rate has reached an all-time high of 85 percent, students are insufficiently prepared for postsecondary education and the…

People's quality of life and opportunities for activity are influenced by their surrounding environments. A substantial body of literature on the positive effects of nature and greenery has emerged during the last 50 years. Additional research has focused on other types of environmental qualities. While some Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs)…

This article presents a constructivist writing placement framework, developed from the study of two pilot iterations of a local writing placement mechanism at a large public research university. Through preliminary analysis of data from these pilots, we present a model of constructivist writing placement and demonstrate how it helps move…