A student's academic success depends on many factors, including aptitude, effort, personality traits, and social and financial situations. This analysis examines the impact on academic performance in the short-term and long-term, measured by course grade and grade point average, respectively of grit, ethnicity, gender, financial stress, and being…

This article presents results from a Scholarships in STEM (S-STEM) grant from the National Science Foundation that supported students from three majors and funded the development of cocurricular activities designed to increase the workforce development of first-generation and underrepresented students. Scholar cohorts were interdisciplinary, with…

Access to school counseling services leads to access to college-readiness counseling initiatives, including science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education-focused counseling for students. School counselor caseload and percentage of time spent on college-readiness counseling were analyzed in relation to longitudinal STEM…

Distance education students have less access to classmates as a social resource and may, therefore, rely more on family members for support. However, first-generation students, or students who are the first in their family to attend university, may lack the academic resources that family members can provide. Overall, first-generation students in…

Summer Bridge Programs (SBP) provide students with academic and social resources that build a support network to facilitate college transition, yet research has focused on quantitative studies. The purpose of this study was to identify how the Summer Bridge Program (SBP) at a predominantly white university (PWI), CU Boulder, helps Latinx…

This study used an exploratory case study approach to explore the motivations and challenges of underrepresented students enrolled in a post-secondary agricultural education degree program. The study's sample consisted of four agricultural education undergraduate students who self-identified as members of an underrepresented group (URG)…

First-generation and low-income students more often find pursuing and completing a college degree challenging, compared to their second-generation peers who come from higher income households. However, in order to mitigate the challenges faced by this marginalized group of students, opportunity programs, such as New Jersey's Educational…

To capture the essence of the sense of belonging for first-generation students (FGS) within an academic unit of study in higher education, this qualitative inquiry used portraiture to provide answers to four research questions. Q1: How do FGS make meaning of belongingness in an academic unit? Q2: How do FGS describe the academic unit's climate…

This study examined if a faculty-run Reading and Writing Lab at a small, private university in the Midwest helped traditionally underserved college freshmen taking developmental English classes increase their levels of self-perceived comprehension and confidence. Students who typically need to take developmental English classes include English as…

Undocumented Latinx college students in rural areas confront a myriad of stressors that challenge their resilience and which merit empirical emphasis. This study will examine the risk and protective factors, and their impact on academic outcomes, of undocumented first generation Latinx college students in Public Institutions in Rural Areas. The…

Background/Context: Previous research suggested that first- or second-generation African immigrants comprised nearly a third of Black students attending selective U. S. colleges (Massey et al., 2007). While research frames the involvement of Black immigrant collegians as distinctly different from African American peers as it pertains to family…

Background/Context: College access programs aim to enhance students' college-going capital, which includes the "knowledge, skills, or dispositions" that support students' pathways to and through higher education (Means & Pyne, 2016, p. 391). While some college access programs aim to remedy students' "deficiencies" in…

In 2017 the National Association of System Heads launched its Taking Student Success to Scale: High Impact Practices Network. The goals of this initiative were to identify and scale promising High Impact Practices (HIPs) at both the campus and system level to prioritize equitable participation for low-income and first-generation students and…

To examine the relationship between participation in a research-based, academic first-year seminar (FYS) and the first-year achievement of STEM students, university data sets were collected from four cohorts (N = 2,543) of incoming STEM students of whom 581 were FYS participants over the four years. Chi-square tests of homogeneity were used to…

University and engineering officials of higher education struggle to recruit, retain, and successfully graduate first-generation African American engineering (FGAAE) students at predominantly White institutions. This study focused on eight FGAAE students from four predominantly White research institutions across the Southeastern United States. The…