As the Latino population continues to rise, so does the need for education among Latinas with dependents within the community. Previous researchers have shown that Latinas have low college completion rates, which decreases their access to a better economic future (housing, health, living conditions). Thus, there is a pressing need to increase the…

Online education is fast growing due to its accessibility and scalability, but engineering has fallen behind other fields in adopting and researching the online educational format. Student course-level attrition is a significant issue in online courses. The goal of this dissertation is to better understand the factors that impact course level…

In recent decades, there has been a revival of free tuition policies around the world. The goals of these policies are typically to increase access to and success in higher education. Although research on free tuition policies is growing, it is mainly focused on providing empirical evidence of its effects on student outcomes in the U.S. context.…

The vision of every elementary, middle, and high school in the United States is to deliver an excellent educational setting to each and every student who enters their school building. Educational research overwhelmingly demonstrates that a primary factor contributing to an "excellent educational setting" is having highly qualified and…

Latinx men continue to be marginalized in higher education, and more research is needed to understand how to retain them using anti-deficit frameworks (Cook et al., 2012). Studies have investigated caballerismo as a protective factor for LatinX men. Caballerismo is defined by egalitarian beliefs, affiliation, positive family relationships, and…

Student success and retention in higher education is an issue faced by many institutions, particularly that of first time, first year college students. Much of the previous research has looked at specific initiatives and approaches these topics from a deficit model. The one common thread of college students are their interactions with faculty.…

The COVID-19 pandemic created the largest disruption of education systems in human history, affecting nearly 1.6 billion learners in more than 200 countries (Pokhrel & Chhetri, 2021). By the end of March 2020, more than 124,000 U.S. public and private school buildings experienced closure affecting 55.1 million U.S. children and over 80 percent…

Community colleges are open access post-secondary institutions that serve a variety of needs for diverse student populations. Community colleges are also often less resourced than four-year colleges, and the students who attend community colleges are more likely to be minoritized, from lower socioeconomic situations, and be less academically…

This phenomenological study addressed the factors of an institutionalized peer to peer mentoring program that fostered academic success and persistence among Black male students graduating from a predominantly White four-year public university in Tennessee through the lens of the critical race theory. Data was gathered through face-to-face,…

This phenomenological study addressed the factors of an institutionalized peer to peer mentoring program that fostered academic success and persistence among Black male students graduating from a predominantly White four-year public university in Tennessee through the lens of the critical race theory. Data was gathered through face-to-face,…

Forty years ago, females surpassed males in enrollment and completion in higher education. Even as the number of students in higher education has increased over the last 4 decades, the number of males who enroll and persist to completion has continued to widen. This gender gap in higher education attainment is starting to gain the attention of…

This qualitative research study explored how the special education teachers describe the administrative support needed to stay in the profession and the barriers to obtaining administrative support in the school district of southcentral Maryland, United States. This study answered two research questions: first, on how the special education…

With the ongoing demographic shifts in the United States, there continues to be an increase of students from low-income households seeking further education (Castleman & Goodman, 2018, p. 20; Fry & Cilluffo, 2019, para. 3). One in three college students in the United States is considered low-income and has Pell Grant eligibility (Lumina…

Hispanic males, including Mexican-Americans, are enrolling in community colleges at a high rate, especially in Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) that are in urban low-income areas. Unfortunately, these students are not graduating at the rate at which their population is growing in colleges. They are often stereotyped as unwilling to learn, but…

Why education faculty are motivated to stay or leave an institution has been questioned for decades. To investigate this problem, 91 faculty from schools of education from eleven research universities participated in this study using Maertz and Campion's Motivational Forces survey. The confirmatory factor analysis results indicate that the…