This guide is designed for counselors, teachers, and advisers who work with high school students from low-income families and students who are the first in their families to pursue a college education. It offers strategies for helping these students identify, consider, and enroll in "match" colleges, that is, selective colleges that are…

The Washington Student Achievement Council is charged with setting educational attainment goals to meet the needs of Washington's residents and its workforce. The Council is also charged with developing a ten-year Roadmap to identify key strategies for meeting those goals. In 2013, the Council created the first Ten-year Roadmap, including two…

Purpose: The purpose of this directory was to identify, describe, and evaluate evidence that the education practices improve academic performance, close the achievement gap, and improve persistence towards graduation for low-income, first-generation, and historically-underrepresented 6th grade through college students. Method: The sample for the…

The college-going rates of rural students lag behind those of more urban students, a gap likely due, in part, to rural students' lower educational aspirations. These lower aspirations appear to be tied to the dilemma that higher education presents for many rural students: whether to remain in their rural home, working in traditional trades and…

The purpose of this mixed methods study was to examine and explore the institutional policy levers that facilitate successful educational outcomes in a TRiO funded Student Success Program at a large, urban research university in the Mid-South. Three research questions guided the study: (1) how do the educational outcomes of the university's TRiO…

Today, over 75 percent of high school seniors aspire to graduate from college. However, only one-third of Americans hold a bachelor's degree, and college graduation rates vary significantly by race/ethnicity and parental socioeconomic status. If most young adults aspire to obtain a college degree, why are these disparities so great? In "From…

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have had the ability to recruit African-American students since the 1860s by stressing a sense of inclusion and family through their mission statements and community outreach. There was little to no competition for African-American students from predominantly white institutions until integration…

As the mother of a first-year-teacher, I began thinking of ways in which to provide encouragement and support to my daughter and to other beginning teachers. I believe that successful teachers should not only share their knowledge and expertise with novice teachers, but also their struggles, their frustrations, and their methods of managing the…

College choice is the three-stage process of aspiring, searching and choosing to attend college. There are many models pertaining to college choice, however, this study uses the Hossler and Gallagher Model---aspiration, search and choice. This qualitative study explored first-generation college students' perceptions about the influences…

As the Biden-Harris administration seeks to hasten the country's recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, reforming the U.S. higher education system to ensure equitable access and attainment for all adults is more important than ever. Most student parents are mothers, students of color, adult and working learners, students with low incomes, and…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the strategies employed by senior level first-generation college students (FGCS) as it pertains to academic self-efficacy, parental support, and cultural capital and their role in college enrollment and matriculation. The examination also included additional emergent factors that contributed to FGCS…

United States Government scrutiny of enrollment practices at for-profit colleges has caused significant decreases in profitability at career colleges. The phenomenological problem explored in this study was the declining enrollment at career colleges. Systems theory and Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory formed the conceptual framework for this…

This study examined the effect of the NOVA program, a Students Support Services program at Eastern Kentucky University, on academic success for first-generation and low-income college students. An archival database was used to identify differences in the level of academic success among first-year students in the NOVA program from fall-to-fall of…

Ten years ago when Ruffalo Noel Levitz (RNL) published its annual study of freshman motivations, those students were entering college in the shadow of the worst recession since the Great Depression. That report, which examined attitudes of students from 2009, provided insight into their motivations, attitudes, and needs in the midst of a very…

Although student retention, persistence, and graduation is a high priority for institutions and policymakers, graduation rates are not improving. Nowadays, more students from first-generation and low-income backgrounds have access to traditional higher education. In this essay, the author argues that an educational system that fails to prepare…