A large and growing number of people worldwide are excluded from participating in the economy and society, which poses a problem not only in achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 on education, but also in making progress on the other goals of the 2030 Agenda, spanning issues from climate change to poverty reduction. The fourth…

Charter schools began in the 1990s as an experimental alternative to public schools. Today they are a multi-billion dollar sector composed of both nonprofit and for-profit corporations that embrace the philosophy of the marketplace. Supporters of charters see school failure as a natural feature of the model. They argue that schools do not fail at…

Low-income racial/ethnic-minority youth in under-resourced school contexts have certain opportunities to acquire institutionally-valued cultural capital. I use observational data from six months of debate practices and competitions with two teams in the Chicago Debate League, as well as interviews with twelve debaters and two coaches, to show that…

Although qualitative research suggests that school choice and other interventions are more beneficial for moderately disadvantaged than severely deprived students, the subject has barely been explored by quantitative studies with either observational or experimental designs. We estimate experimentally the impact of a voucher offer on college…

This dissertation seeks to better understand the experiences of families as they navigate systems and networks to gain access to the opportunities they want and need for their themselves and for their children. The specific area of focus for this research is how families, and more specifically women and mothers, are entering into a Formal Early…

Black students who attend PWIs often experience social exclusion on campus. To gain a greater understanding of this issue I conducted a qualitative research study that allowed me to gain insight of the difficulties that Black undergraduate students experience at PWIs. The institutions in this study excluded Black students by not providing the…

Context matters in the design and development of educational opportunities. Despite extensive global efforts to make education accessible for all, one out of every five children are out-of-school. The situation demands re-thinking of learning strategies, particularly in underprivileged contexts. Continued advancements in learning technologies may…

Despite the increasing popularity in the academy of collaborative approaches to research, evaluating the impacts of Students-as-Partners (SaP) initiatives has thus far received less systematic attention. This paper presents an evaluation of a participatory community-based research project where academics partnered with 15 mature students in a…

In this descriptive study, I examined data from the Bill and Melinda Gates Millennial Scholars Cohort 3 Survey Data whom are high- achieving, low-income, historically marginalized college students, to identify the unique characteristics of students whose parents have not attended college. More specifically, academic preparation, academic…

Many recent movies about African American life have focused on people leaving the ghetto. Earlier movies about groups living in ghettoes have portrayed the ghetto as a permanent reality. Moviemakers explored ghetto life as an interesting subject and a source of cultural innovation. Life was hard, but social and cultural ways to cope with…

Practitioners working to widen participation to universities in England are an increasingly important and professionally diverse group but surprisingly absent from the academic literature and lacking in access to bespoke professional development pathways in HE. In England current approaches within policy and research also tend to position them as…

The Roma are the largest and, some scholars would argue, the most marginalized group in Europe, an observation evident in an examination of school texts for Polish children. Using the concept of the "geographies of silence," we discuss the nature of text and graphical silences and the reasons behind the paucity of text, photo, and map…

Effective multiculturally competent treatment of economically disadvantaged clients requires an awareness of the stereotypes and biases that these clients and their families face in contemporary culture--stereotypes that are so pervasive that they can subtly influence counselors' thinking about poor and working-class individuals. In this article,…

Our investigation focusses on a group of eleven lower-middle-class students from classrooms in which the teachers did most of the talking and students rarely asked any questions. We have examined whether spontaneous discussions among the students in a less structured setting would include questioning, and what kinds of questions they might ask.…

The 60th anniversary of "The Journal of College Student Development" presents an opportunity to examine the changing landscape of a subsection of the scholarly discourse in student affairs as reflected in the articles published in JCSD. I traced highly cited authors and conversations through network-based citation analysis from 1959…