More than 14,000 new master’s degree programs have been created in the last two decades, which is likely driven by an effort to increase institutional revenues during challenging financial times. But this expansion creates a risk that these new programs fail to generate a return on investment for students or taxpayers. We examined student debt and debt-to-earnings outcomes for students attending newer versus longstanding master’s programs and found that new programs at private universities tend to graduate students with less debt than their more established counterparts. There were no consistent relationships between program establishment and debt outcomes at public universities.
In this study, we advance the concept of credit loss shock for vertical transfer students. Using novel administrative data in Texas, we demonstrate that credit loss is inversely related to retention and short-term persistence, but largely unrelated to long-term persistence. This pattern is partially explained by positive associations between credit loss and engaging in subsequent transfers. We separately examine general credit loss and major credit loss and find that MCL is more strongly related to posttransfer retention, persistence, and subsequent transfers. These findings suggest credit loss shock, driven by MCL, may promote institutional swirl without deterring students’ long-term degree attainment.
In this presidential address commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), I contend that the moral arc of higher education does not bend toward justice without intentional, collective action. Drawing on personal narrative, historical analysis, and cultural metaphor, the address situates contemporary assaults on higher education including anti-intellectualism, anti-DEI legislation, constraints on academic freedom, and technological inequities within longer histories of anti-literacy laws and the politicization of knowledge. Also noted is how Artificial Intelligence is quickly changing higher education, bringing new innovations as well as challenges in equity, access, and ethics. Framed through the tradition of the griot, I advance scholarly creative expression as both a methodological and ethical intervention, positioning storytelling, art, and narrative as vital forms of knowledge production and resistance. Inspired by the principles of critical hope, the address calls on scholars and leaders to engage in truth-telling, mentorship, advocacy, and imaginative praxis. In a moment of profound retrenchment and possibility, I invite the field to move beyond documenting inequity toward co-creating more just, humane, and liberatory futures in higher education.
This scholarly article seeks to advance mentoring literature and theory in ways that provide faculty with tools to embed informal critical mentoring practices within their teaching and advising. I argue that faculty have a powerful yet often unrealized opportunity to disrupt micro-level relational inequities through everyday interactions with students, particularly students from historically minoritized backgrounds who often face unequal access to meaningful mentoring relationships. Drawing from mentoring scholarship and learning theory, I identify and describe four interrelated forms of critical mentoring practice: academic, career development, psychosocial, and relational. These practices foreground power, positionality, relational inequities, and student agency, while emphasizing validation, advocacy, reciprocity, and culturally relevant interactions. I introduce the concept of “critical mentoring moments” to describe brief, individualized, and culturally relevant facultystudent interactions that build connection and trust. I then bring these ideas together in a conceptual model of critical student mentoring that explains relationships among mentoring inputs, critical mentoring moments, critical mentoring practices, informal mentoring relationships, and students’ learning and development outcomes. I assert that critical mentoring moments can serve as initiating mechanisms for the development of informal mentoring relationships, which in turn contribute to specific forms of student learning and development. I conclude with implications and recommendations to inform faculty practice, academic leadership, mentoring research, and theory.
As a near-ubiquitous organizational feature of higher education, honors education constitutes a center of academic excellence that operates via exclusionary practices. Although collegiate honors education has gone largely unnoticed by researchers, many within the honors community have expressed growing concerns that have prompted calls to action and initiated efforts toward developing programs and colleges that meet the joint ideals of excellence and equity. This qualitative case study examines equity and excellence as competing goals within an honors college at a university committed to inclusive excellence. Findings illustrate the limits of inclusive excellence when conceived in ways that exclude.
Research rarely considers the roles of disability—and ableism—in shaping the experiences of Black faculty. Drawing from semi-structured interviews with 26 Black disabled faculty members, this study reveals how participants grapple with intersections of racism, ableism, and disablism (Dolmage, 2017) while deliberating disclosure. I leverage disability critical race theory (DisCrit; Annamma et al., 2013; Banks et al., 2022) and argue that non-disclosure is a strategic act of agency to resist marginalization at their institutions. However, the conditions that make non-disclosure a prudent decision limit the full participation of Black faculty in the academy. I conclude with recommendations for research and practice.
Using Superwoman Schema as a framework, we examined how Black women faculty navigated the tenure and promotion process through a mixed methodology, where we emphasize the qualitative part of data in more depth. Participants reported exceeding expectations in research, teaching, and service requirements to attain tenure and promotion at the expense of their well-being. While the larger survey data suggested that Black women faculty highly endorsed being a superwoman, in our qualitative data, we found differences in how Black women felt pressured to be “superwomen” across various academic ranks and institutional contexts. This study complicates the idea of the superwoman schema as a coping strategy, where opaque tenure and promotion requirements exacerbate the pressures that Black women may feel. We offer implications for Black women faculty as they navigate challenges within the academy.
The number of autistic college students has rapidly increased over the past decade. Using a convergent, mixed-methods design, we analyzed data from 930 surveys completed by autistic undergraduates attending roughly 400 U.S. institutions in Fall 2022 and Fall 2023 to identify factors students themselves believe most affect their postsecondary success. Guided by a novel IPACE framework (Identity, Psychology, Academics, Community, Employment) and Astin’s Inputs–Environments–Outputs model, students rated 23 items on a helpful–harmful continuum and provided narrative responses about their college experiences. Linear mixed models and tiered pairwise comparisons indicated top-rated facilitators spanning the domains of academics, psychology, community, and employment: major coursework, academic skills, personal grit, friends, instructors, professional supports, and future plans. Qualitative themes mirrored and complicated these quantitative results, revealing how relationships, campus resources (e.g., disability services, mental health supports, student organizations), and personal attributes intersect in everyday college life. Some influences were mixed or unexpectedly negative: disability service offices and families were rated as harmful by a nontrivial proportion of students, and several identity-related items (gender, sexuality, race) and employment-related items were among the least helpful. Differences by class standing suggested growing disillusionment with some services over time. Collectively, findings challenge assumptions that single offices or individuals can ensure success for autistic students. Instead, when awareness and acceptance of autistic students permeate an entire campus, it helps create personally adaptive institutional environments in which autistic students can be confident they have access to the people, resources, and tools they need to thrive in college.
This article uses a multigroup structural equation modeling approach to examine the relationships between perceptions of Ph.D. program racial climate, resilience, well-being, and program satisfaction in a national sample of 1,053 current Ph.D. students. Situated within a critical adaptation of Lent’s social-cognitive career theory framework, the findings caution against focusing exclusively on resilience and well-being, as poor program racial climate disparately impacts Students of Color. In addition, this article discusses implications for doctoral programs as professional preparation for working in environments with poor racial climates.
Corequisite math coursework is a structural reform that places students directly into college-level math concurrently with developmental support. Growing evidence illustrates that participation in corequisite math improves college-level math completion, but the medium-and long-term effects appear mixed across institutional contexts. Further, it is unclear whether there is variation in the short-, medium-, and long-term effects of the corequisite model across race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Using Texas statewide administrative data, this study employed a regression discontinuity design to estimate the average and differential impact of corequisite math coursework on student outcomes up to six years after college entry.
Nearly 75% of higher education/student affairs (HESA) practitioners depart the fields within their first decade, partly due to health and wellness. Drawing from a larger study of eight Black women HESA administrators' experiences, we asked, "How do Black women HESA professionals negotiate health and wellness in or after transitioning from the profession?" using Black feminist epistemology. With intersectionality as a conceptual framework, our data culminated in three qualitative counter-narratives. First, structural intersectionality uncovered how Black women face extensive pressures to conform to ideal worker norms rather than prioritizing their well-being in "prioritizing work over wellness." Next, we use political intersectionality to elucidate how supervisors are critical in promoting or undermining wellness in and relating to HESA workplaces in "(in)sufficient support for self-care." Lastly, we use representational intersectionality to underscore how participants endure and manage workplace stress(ors) while being constrained to personal rather than systemic solutions in "the true costs of Black women's health."
Scholars often assume college graduates majoring in applied science and business have labor market advantages over liberal arts graduates because they learn more in-demand skills. Based on interviews with 91 college seniors and follow-up interviews after graduation, I evaluate connections between graduates' classroom concepts, entry-level tasks, and employment conditions. Analysis reveals many Engineering and Business alumni land "good" jobs-yet undertake clerical work. Meanwhile, liberal arts majors often use classroom concepts at work but rarely have high salaries. I, therefore, reveal a paradox of marketability: the most marketable (in-demand) college graduates do not necessarily use their degree-specific content at work, and the least marketable students may not receive gainful employment even when demonstrating their degree usage to employers. Based on these findings, I build off human capital theory and institutional theories of higher education to advance a conceptual framework that argues college majors are unique sites of cultural value that pay off for graduates independently of skill-use.
Higher education scholarship reflects no consensus on the impact of peers on academic outcomes. This inconsistency may stem from the absence of a common methodological approach to estimate peer effects. Using administrative records of two cohorts of low-income students participating in a comprehensive college transition program across three campuses, we employ complex systems network thinking to estimate if students impact and are impacted by their peers' performance in loose-cohort learning community courses. Findings provide evidence of peer/spillover effects in cumulative GPA, persistence, and credits attained. Loose-cohort learning communities promote academic achievement and success for students with varying prior academic performance.
Internships are common undergraduate experiences, although the rise of virtual and hybrid modalities invoke new questions about how students experience changing work environments. Virtual and hybrid work formats are especially common in computing, a field dominated by men. This study uses Acker's theory of gendered organizations and intersectionality to explore how undergraduate women experienced in-person, hybrid, and virtual computing internships. Findings illustrate the complex nature and results of modality, with virtual internships promoting access and bodily agency, but rendering women invisible. In-person settings amplified hypervisibility, isolation, and vulnerability, but also provided more opportunity for connection and solidarity.
This comparative case study compares the experiences of low-income student-mothers living in Democratic-versus Republican-controlled states to interrogate the impact of state aid on their trajectories. Using Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory as a guide, we argue that liberal aid policies and the state context in which they are enacted facilitate student-mothers' access to and success in college. Findings underscore the critical function that states can serve in implementing policies and programs, particularly for those most in need of support, and point out the inequities facing low-income student-parents shaped significantly by the ruling political parties in different states.
To arrest declining affordability, many state policies directly target college prices through freezes and caps. We estimate the intended and unintended effects of a new type of tuition control, which sets a binding range around price growth. We leverage complementary difference-in-differences and synthetic control methods and document divergent responses across two-year and four-year sectors. Four-years raised in-state tuition to the range’s upper limit, surpassing estimated increases in the absence of regulation. Twoyears held in-state tuition increases constant with peers but raised out-of-state tuition and reduced institutional grants. These findings underscore the need for sector-specific, robust policy designs to advance affordability.
Women’s experiences in engineering are fraught with issues beyond their underrepresentation. Utilizing the concept of the double bind and intersectionality, this interpretive phenomenological study examined data from interviews with 32 first-year women undergraduate engineering students during their first few weeks of college to understand how women’s early experiences inform the ways they position themselves in engineering. We were concerned with how women’s self-understanding is inherently intertwined with how they make calculated moves based on contradictory messaging about their competence and suitability for engineering both prior to and early on in their college experience. We found that women engineering students of all races and ethnicities begin college already caught in a double bind that forces them to navigate conflicting social expectations, which are intensified and reified during their early college experiences as they face the entrenched gender expectations in engineering. For women of Color, the whiteness of the space uniquely heightened, differentiated, and situated their experiences. We conclude our discussion with implications that center equity in both experiences and outcomes
University-industry partnerships (UIPs) in STEM expand opportunities for students and incorporate industry experiences into the academic enterprise. While UIPs have increased, few studies explore marginalized students’ experiences within industry settings. Our study addresses this literature gap with an emphasis on Black women in computing from HBCUs. We utilized the Role Strain and Adaptation Model for Black Women’s STEM Success and phenomenological approaches to explore challenges that many Black women encounter in UIPs—specifically structural inequities at the intersection of race and gender; macroaggressions and imposter syndrome. Implications for practice, research, and policy are discussed while noting increasingly complicated climates for diversity efforts.
Women remain problematically underrepresented in computing fields. Guided by the STEM momentum framework, we leverage Florida administrative data to investigate the relationship between community college students' gender, advanced high school STEM coursework, and their pathways to postsecondary degrees. We find that advanced high school coursework functions differently by gender and STEM field. Notably, completing computing courses and advanced mathematics courses especially promotes community college women's selection of STEM majors and completion of computing degrees. Implications for advanced high school course offerings are discussed with respect to research and policy, especially with respect to enhancing opportunities for community college students.
