Bachelor’s Degree Completion Across State Contexts: Does the Distribution of Enrollments Make a Difference?

Growing accountability pressures, accompanied by a lack of readily accessible measures of institutional performance, have led to an increasing focus on graduation rates. Although previous research has illuminated myriad factors influencing students’ likelihood of educational success, it has not paid adequate attention to how state contexts may shape student outcomes. I build on the small but growing body of research exploring the role of state characteristics in facilitating student success in higher education. Controlling for a range of state and individual attributes, I examine how one aspect of the state context––the distribution of enrollments in 2 vs. 4-year public institutions––is related to bachelor’s degree attainment of students attending public 4-year colleges and universities. The results suggest that the larger the proportion of students attending community colleges in a state, the higher the probability of bachelor’s degree attainment at public 4-year institutions. This appears to be a product of student sorting: the presence of community colleges facilitates sorting of students into higher education in a way that is associated with higher degree completion at public 4-year institutions. These findings have important implications for research on student outcomes and policies aimed at evaluating the performance of public 4-year institutions.     

Techniques for Improving Online Community College Completion Rates: Narrow the Path?

This paper provides a brief overview of the status of retention and completion efforts among community colleges in the United States. This article identifies a number of successful strategies utilized in on-ground institutions that may translate well to online programs. In light of these successes, the article questions whether the costly current approaches by administrators of online institutions are not overlooking effective alternatives. The article also provides a number of questions for further discussion.     

What Do We Know About Online Coursetaking,Persistence, Transfer,and Degree Completion Among Community College Students?

ABSTRACT

Surprisingly, and despite the vast literature on the subject, there is little agreement on the most vital issues surrounding online learning in community colleges. While some studies report that community college students are hampered by online course enrollment, others have found that community college students who take online courses are more likely to persist and succeed in the long term. With this in mind, the present essay will review and synthesize the empirical research literature in order to establish what is known about online coursetaking and the effects on community college students with regard to course completion, persistence, transfer, and degree completion.     

Teaching for All? Teach For America's Effects Across the Distribution of Student Achievement

ABSTRACT

This article examines the effect of Teach For America (TFA) on the distribution of student achievement in elementary school. It extends previous research by estimating quantile treatment effects (QTE) to examine how student achievement in TFA and non-TFA classrooms differs across the broader distribution of student achievement. It also updates prior distributional work on TFA by correcting for previously unidentified missing data and estimating unconditional rather than conditional QTE. Consistent with previous findings, results reveal a positive impact of TFA teachers across the distribution of math achievement. In reading, however, relative to veteran non-TFA teachers, students at the bottom of the reading distribution score worse in TFA classrooms, and students in the upper half of the distribution perform better.     

Testing Stereotype Threat: Does Anxiety Explain Race and Sex Differences in Achievement?

Steele's (1992, 1997) stereotype-threat theory attempts to explain underperformance of minority students in academic domains and of women in mathematics. Steele argues that situational self-relevance of negative group stereotypes in testing situations increases the anxiety these students experience and that these differential anxiety levels explain performance differences. Research shows that manipulation of stereotype threat can affect academic performance. However, there has been little research testing whether anxiety does at least partially explain the relationship between race and achievement. The goal of this study was to examine whether anxiety will explain racial differences in academic performance and gender differences in math performance in the context of a nationally representative sample of high school seniors. Partial mediation was observed, with anxiety explaining significant portions of the racial differences in academic performance. Anxiety also partially explained sex differences in math achievement, although the effect sizes were very small. These results provide general support for Steele's stereotype-threat hypothesis.     

What's in It for Me? Incentives,Learning, and Completion in Massive Open Online Courses

This study investigated the distribution of incentives (e.g., certificates, badges) for massive open online course (MOOC) completion, and relationships between incentives and MOOC outcomes. Participants were 779 MOOC students internationally who participated in at least 303 different MOOCs offered by at least 12 providers. MOOC participants most commonly intended to receive, and in actuality received, free and paid course certificates of completion; other incentives (e.g., digital badges, postsecondary credits) were far less common. In addition, MOOC participants' intentions to receive both free and paid certificates were consistently and positively related to perceived learning and course completion, net other factors. (Keywords: massive open online courses, MOOCs, motivation, incentives, microcredentials, certificates of completion)     

Predicting College Students’ Intergroup Friendships Across Race/Ethnicity,Religion, Sexual Orientation,and Social Class

This study seeks to expand the literature on predicting friendship diversity beyond race/ethnicity to include religion, social class, and sexual orientation. Survey packets elicited information regarding up to four close friendships developed during college. Additional measures assessed pre-college friendship diversity, participation in college activities and diversity education, intergroup attitudes, and interpersonal communication apprehension. A total of 588 friendships (213 intragroup and 375 intergroup) were reported by 151 college students. Pre-college friendship diversity was the primary predictor of college friendship diversity across each intergroup dimension. Implications for prejudice reduction are discussed.     

Aiding or Dissuading? The Effects of Reducing Lifetime Eligibility Limits for Need-Based Aid on Bachelor’s Degree Attainment and Time to Completion

Research in Higher Education - Little is known about the effects of need-based financial aid disbursed late into college and how students respond when they approach lifetime limits for receiving...     

Liberty and Justice for All? The Paradox of Governmental Rhetoric

Although all organizational discourse (mis)represents various publics' interests it is supposed to represent, this study highlights the paradoxical nature of government rhetoric. Using Cincinnati's announcements of urban renewal as a case study, this essay discusses how the nature of organizational rhetoric opens this form of discourse up to sharper claims of illegitimacy and explores the various ways the nature of city government problematizes organizational rhetoric. Due to its possible condemning nature, especially as it relates to the interests of minority publics and their subsequent marginalization in eminent domain battles, this essay demonstrates the power and, at times, the adverse effects of governmental rhetoric and encourages scholars to engage in future research that further explores the distinguishing characteristics of government rhetoric and the implications surrounding its use.     

“Sweet Little (White) Girls”? Sex and Fantasy Across the Color Line and the Contestation of Patriarchal White Supremacy

The presence of the Little Rock Nine at Little Rock's Central High in September 1957 as a result of Brown vs. the Board of Education evoked anger, fear, and even panic among some parts of the white community, and many white women and girls responded with near hysteria. This article seeks to answer why. What was it about integration that provoked such a response from many Whites, and especially from white females? By briefly examining both the history of white racism and the socio-political context of the 1950s, this article argues that what Little Rock Whites, and in particular white females, were responding to was the fear of miscegenation. Yet this was not exactly the same fear of miscegenation that had spread throughout the South in the post-Civil War period in which white woman were supposedly at peril from the “black male rapist.” This fear of miscegenation, it is argued, had a new twist and that new twist came from the white women and girls themselves. Based on an analysis of the actions of individual white female Central High students from the perspectives of race, class, and gender, this article argues that not only were race relations in a state of flux but so were gender and class relations, giving Little Rock's “sweet little (white) girls” a pivotal role in the events surrounding the desegregation of Central High.     

Youth,skills development,and work in the Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2012: Learning from Asia or for Asia?

The article underlines the historic importance of the treatment of skills development, finally, by the Education for All Global Monitoring Report (GMR) team. Among the many challenges in its analysis are the multiple and overlapping meanings of the word skill, and the consequent difficulties of quantifying and monitoring efforts at skills development. The positioning of skills development within secondary education is a further area of huge diversity and contestation. Beyond this, the claimed relationships between skills and growth require careful teasing out. As important as any, however, are the relations amongst skills, work, and employment (and unemployment) in both the urban and rural informal sectors. The article argues that although GMR 2012 breaks a great deal of new ground in addressing skills development, it ends up being rather a school-based account of skill; very little attention is given to post-school skills development in the further education and training colleges of many societies. Equally, it underplays the impact of the wider macroeconomic environment on skills development. Finally, the article suggests that much can be learned from Asia, as well as for Asia, in this crucial world of skills development.     

Only STEM Can Save Us? Examining Race,Place, and STEM Education as Property

The rhetoric about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in urban schools reflects a desire to imagine a new city that is poised to compete in a STEM-centered future. Therefore, STEM has been positioned as a critical part of urban education reform efforts. In various US cities, schools labeled as failing are being repurposed as selective STEM-intensive academies to build a STEM education infrastructure. In Memphis, Tennessee, this process makes visible issues with educational inequity, exacerbated by school choice and gentrification processes. In this article, I use whiteness as property, a tenet of critical race theory, to examine STEM education in Memphis as a case of urban STEM-based education reform in the United States. I describe claiming STEM education as property as a 2-phase process in which middle-class Whites in urban areas participate to secure STEM education by repurposing failed Black schools and to maintain it by institutionalizing selective admissions strategies.     

Who's in the house? Race differences in cohabitation,single parenthood,and child development

This study examined four questions: (1) How does family structure (specifically, single parenthood, married parent, and cohabitating parent) affect children's delinquency and math test scores? (2) Do these effects differ by race? (3) Do parenting practices mediate the links between family structure and children's outcomes? and (4) Does this mediation differ by race? Unlike some previous work in this area, the present study distinguished between the effects of single parenthood and cohabitation. Using fixed-effects techniques to control for unobserved heterogeneity between children in the various family structures, single parenthood was found to be associated with reduced well-being among European American children, but not African American children. Cohabitation was associated with greater delinquency among African American children, and lower math scores among European American children. No evidence was found to indicate that parenting mediated the links between family structure and children's outcomes. Finally, it was found that for African American children, measures of maternal warmth and the provision of rules had direct effects on children's delinquency.