Community colleges are increasingly important places for language minority students to access higher education. Unfortunately, this group of students is the least likely to persist in terms of re-enrollment, degree completion, or transfer to four-year institutions. In this study, we used structured equation modeling with a sample of 10,637…

In 2009, President Obama called for a simplification of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), resulting in the average family completing the FAFSA in 20 minutes. Yet, during the 2013-2014 college application season, nearly 900,000 Pell Grant-eligible high school graduates did not complete the FAFSA, leaving $2.9 billion in Pell…

Evidence-based practice (EBP) is considered a major respiratory therapy competency established by the profession and essential to the clinical decision-making process. Currently, there is a limited understanding of what factors influence the use of EBP among respiratory therapists. The purpose of this study was to assess the factors associated…

The rural brain drain, an event wherein a rural locale's educated youth out-migrates, is speculated to be the root cause of nonmetropolitan human capital exhaustion. This study promotes the speculation that community colleges hold promise in reversing the brain drain, as they are primed to elevate the human capital level of stayers while offering…

California Community Colleges are instrumental to creating access to higher education for Latino males, a population of students who tend to have lower college completion rates compared to their non-Latino peers. Programs like Promise support males with improving educational outcomes and academic performance. This mixed-method study explores the…

Community college students aspiring to transfer into STEM majors at a four-year institution face a complicated and nuanced admissions process. In some cases, students may be admitted to the four-year transfer institution but face additional requirements to enter a STEM major. This study of community college underserved students of color, women,…

The Aid Like A Paycheck student survey was designed to shed light on students' academic and financial attitudes, behaviors, and circumstances over the course of a semester. This supplement to MDRC's final report on Aid Like A Paycheck describes the survey, response rates, and responses to each survey item at three community college systems: two in…

The North Carolina Community College System's mission includes a responsibility to "open the door to high-quality, accessible educational opportunities that minimize barriers to post-secondary education" and "maximize student success." Access and academic progress are essential for North Carolinians as they explore career…

The cost of college course materials has increased dramatically in recent years. Traditional publishers advocate the use of lower-cost digital and custom editions, but both options have limitations in their ability to save students money (Senack & Donoghue, 2016). Open-educational resources (OER) are openly-licensed materials that may be used…

This regression event history study identified factors that are related to the attrition of remedial math students at a rural Kansas community college. It was guided by Bean and Metzner's Nontraditional Undergraduate Student Attrition Model (1985). This study extended the applicability of the Bean and Metzner's (1985) Conceptual Model to remedial…

The issue of low community college retention and completion rates has become an important concern in recent years. The lack of persistence among college students has led to a variety of institutional initiatives including first-year experience courses, intrusive advising, and other innovative approaches. Among these approaches, First-Year…

A vast amount of research has been devoted to the persistence and retention of college students since the 1970s. Recent research has focused on targeted populations such as first year students, racially minoritized, students with low social economic status and students at the developmental/remedial level. Nevertheless, limited scholarly research…

This research is an exploratory study that focused on describing the experiences of adult students who identify themselves as women enrolled in male-dominated Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) career pathway programs at a large Midwestern multi-campus community college. The study was undertaken to build on the research of women in…

This dissertation examines the history, funding, structure, efficacy, and challenges of dual enrollment programs in English (and more specifically in First-Year Composition, FYC, courses) that provide access to higher education for high school students prior to graduation, as these programs have developed and currently operate in the United…

Previous research has indicated that an intervention called "exam wrappers" can improve students' metacognition when they are using wrappers in more than one course per academic term. In this study, we tested if exam wrappers would improve students' metacognition and academic performance when used in only one course per academic term. A…