The 1st-year retention rate of the Structured Education Program (SEP) is 90%, yet the 6-year graduation rate of SEP students is 29%. The gap between SEP 1st-year retention and graduation rates is the problem that this study addressed. The low graduation rate of SEP students is an important issue because graduation rates are used to measure the…

This research project is a study comparing for-profit schools and traditional universities related to student persistence, graduation rate, and job placement. The results based on a sample size of 92 students indicate that there is no significant difference between persistence, graduation rates and successful job placement at either school. There…

Limited research results have been provided on the influence of schools on dropout prevention, which consist of the accountability system and how teachers' attitudes affect students' decisions to dropout. The specific problem of interest was how the accountability model and teacher-student relationships plays a vital role in student dropout. The…

Betsy DeVos, the new U.S. secretary of education, is a strong proponent of allowing public education dollars to go to private schools through vouchers, which enable parents to use public school money to enroll their children in private schools, including religious ones. Vouchers are advanced under the rubric of "school choice"--the…

Purpose: The purpose of this journal-ready dissertation was to examine the 1-year and 2-year persistence rates of Black students in Texas community colleges for the 2007-2008 through the 2014-2015 academic years. Specifically, the relationship of the 1-year and 2-year persistence rates for Black students as a function of their institutional status…

The purpose of this study was to investigate and identify possible relationships between academic achievement, as measured by high school graduation rate and ACT composite scores of individual school districts within the state of Tennessee, and the per-pupil expenditure of each district. Research was conducted to determine whether a significant…

Guided pathways are emerging as a strategy to help students complete a credential in a timely manner by encouraging or requiring them to select a program, and develop a degree plan or map, on a specified timeline. At a minimum, institutions may ask students to identify a meta-major, which is a broad area of academic programs with related courses…

In 2014-15, the high school graduation rate reached a record high of 83 percent (U.S. Department of Education 2016). Despite the gains, over half a million students still drop out of high school each year (U.S. Department of Education 2015). High schools have adopted various strategies designed to keep students who are at risk of not graduating in…

This study uses the Clark and Estes gap analysis framework to examine completion rates in online learning. The purpose of this project was to identify the knowledge, motivation, and organizational barriers influencing the first cohort of an online MBA program at a prestigious university. The results and recommendations from this study provide a…

Early warning systems (EWS), in the context of secondary transition, are tools that analyze individual student-level data and estimate each student's risk of dropping out of school or completing school on time. Such tools generally consider three primary types of data--commonly referred to as the A, B, Cs: attendance/absence data,…

This case was developed for use with future school and district leaders in an educational setting. There are several topics of discussion that can be developed, including but not limited to decentralization as a large-scale reform, policy implementation, the superintendency, and urban schools. The setting is a fictional southwestern urban school…

Youth participatory action research (YPAR) is a form of critical participatory action research that provides young people with opportunities to identify injustices in their current social realities, to gather and analyze data about these phenomena, and to determine actions that will begin to rectify their negative outcomes. A growing body of…

Launched in 1997, the Diversity Scholars Research Program (DSRP) is an undergraduate performance-based scholarship program that aims to attract academically talented, underrepresented minority (URM) students to the IUPUI campus. The program provides financial assistance (tuition, academic stipend, conference travel, and some housing), mentoring,…

Many interventions have been proposed to improve the retention and graduation rates of engineering students. One such intervention is to use study groups for first-year college students; such groups provide a structured environment in which the students can learn course material from each other outside of class and can provide the students with a…

This article considers student affairs practice within the Completion Agenda by studying community college student affairs educators' beliefs about their work related to the value others attribute to it. The Completion Agenda's goals are largely economic, and community colleges have been asked to focus on speed rather than the quality of the…