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Examines the relationships between five components of students′ quality of learning experience (resources, content, learning flexibility, student‐faculty contact, and involvement) and four criteria of college outcomes (students′ satisfaction with their college experience, perceived performance in college, commitment to their college and students′ grades). The major findings of this study indicate that students′ involvement and learning flexibility are the dominant predictors of all four students′ college outcomes, whereas resources and content are the weakest predictors. In addition, quality of learning experience indicators are effective predictors of students′ satisfaction with their college experience (R⊃2 = 0.27) and grades (R⊃2 = 0.20). Discusses the implications of these findings.

This literature review aims to look at the unique role of community colleges as they address the information literacy needs of their students, who are by nature continuously in transition to and from the institution.

Library science databases and online sources were reviewed for relevant information.

Community colleges are addressing the needs of their various student populations in a variety of ways.

The role of the community college library is underrepresented in the literature. This review provides more information about the unique role that community colleges fill in the higher education ecosystem.

College students and their alcohol use have been the subject of numerous studies over the last three decades and have received an increasing amount of attention (Engs, 1977; Hanson and Engs, 1984; Gadaleto and Anderson, 1986; Downs, 1987; Thompson and Wilsnack, 1987; Janosik and Anderson, 1989; Tryon, 1992). Studies on student alcohol use began appearing in the literature in the mid‐1970's (Penn, 1974; Rouse and Ewing, 1978; Newton, 1978). Subsequent studies (Scheller‐Gilkey, Gomberg, and Clay, 1979; Heritage, 1979; O'Connell and Patterson, 1989) have documented consistently high levels of alcohol consumption and a serious abuse problem on college campuses. Although some studies (Condon and Carman, 1986; Hanson and Engs, 1986) indicate that overall consumption has reached a plateau, Gonzalez (1986) reported that 89% of male students and 86% of female students surveyed drank alcohol, and many suffered from alcohol related problems. Further, both recent survey data (Eigen, 1991) and participant‐observer studies (Moffatt, 1989) suggest that collegiate drinking is a very serious health concern. Moffatt found that to a great extent college students' lives revolved around the acquisition and consumption of alcohol and constituted students' favourite collective activity. Surveys revealed that no other population group in the United States has a more serious drinking problem than does the college student population (Gonzalez, 1986). Both men and women drink more as they progress through the college, and those who drink more also experience more alcohol‐related problems (Gonzalez, 1989).

Academic franchising has provided opportunities for many thousands of students who would otherwise have been excluded from higher education. Yet, despite the continued presence of franchised courses, the approach has been, as far as possible, to make them fit in alongside traditional courses. Reports some of the work carried out by CERLIM at the University of Central Lancashire during the two‐year Library Support for Franchised Courses in Higher Education project, which was part‐funded by the British Library. Notes the differences in provision between college and university libraries and examines the student experience within this context. Identifies weakness in provision and describes the students’ coping strategies. Presents the practical implications of this work as suggestions to library managers for improving practice in the college and university libraries.

At this year's National Union of Students' Technical College Conference an NUS vice‐president, Mr Albert Swindlehurst, suggested that the age of technical college entrants be raised to 18. Such a move, so ran his argument, would put an end to teaching staff over‐ruling the students' unions in colleges where the students were very young, and would remove the present inhibitions on social life caused by the lack of bars where students could gather in convivial fraternities.

This practitioner-based manuscript describes the development and implementation of Focus on College Understanding and Success (FOCUS), a school-university programmatic model to develop College Access Literacy (CAL) among both students and educators in a Professional Development School (PDS) network. With an emphasis on teacher training, supplemental learning opportunities for students, and faculty-student-parent mentor/partnerships, this model was designed to apply a culturally responsive approach to achieving equity in college readiness programming.

The paper is conceptual in that it presents an innovative idea to stimulate discussion, generate new ideas, and advance thinking about a collective impact school-university partnership initiative focused on supporting underrepresented students in pursuing higher education goals through participation in the FOCUS program. A thematic analysis was completed on focus group data collected for both educators and students who participated in the project. Data focused on the identification of both strengths and challenges of program development and implementation.

The paper provides insights and ideas related to how to structure a college access and success program that focuses on the assets that underrepresented students bring to college readiness opportunities designed for them by centering their struggles while uplifting their personal, unique abilities. Our results validate a college readiness program design and implementation process that relies on asset-based theoretical frameworks including Yosso’s (2005) Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) model and Moll et al.’s (1992) Funds of Knowledge (FoK) framework.

This study shows how school-university partnerships are uniquely positioned to capitalize on the strengths of students and their families in designing college readiness programming. By considering the local context and culturally responsive approaches to program development and implementation, programs like FOCUS can build on community resources and the teacher-student relationship to increase College Access Literacy (CAL) in both students and their teachers.

This study aims to understand the effects of study abroad experiences, specifically on undergraduate business students, who are an underrepresented body in study abroad research. This focus is purposeful and driven by accreditation pressures to improve retention and graduation rates while stressing the benefits of internationalization and experiential learning.

This study uses a cohort analysis for two-, three- and four-year retention and graduation rates from a college of business from 2003 to 2019. This study follows similar cohorts of students at the university, college and major levels and compares their performance over time.

The results show a positive impact of studying abroad on both retention and graduation rates. Accordingly, this study recommends that deans and administrators in colleges of business use study abroad as a tool for retention and graduation, in addition to the traditional benefits of studying abroad.

This study is unique in that business students are this study’s main focus. This study assesses study abroad benefits not only to their graduation rates but also to retention. Also, this study tracks these two performance metrics over a long period and makes comparisons between several groups of business students and different levels of the university. This study also makes comparisons to students not participating in study abroad.

First-generation college students in the United States are a unique demographic that is often characterized by the institutions that serve them with a risk-laden and deficit-based model. However, our analysis of the transcripts of open-ended, semi-structured interviews with 22 “first-gen” respondents suggests they are actively deft, agentic, self-determining parties to processes of identity construction that are both externally imposed and potentially stigmatizing, as well as exemplars of survivance and determination. We deploy a grounded theory approach to an open-coding process, modeled after the extended case method, while viewing our data through a novel synthesis of the dual theoretical lenses of structural and radical/structural symbolic interactionism and intersectional/standpoint feminist traditions, in order to reveal the complex, unfolding, active strategies students used to make sense of their obstacles, successes, co-created identities, and distinctive institutional encounters. We find that contrary to the dictates of prevailing paradigms, identity-building among first-gens is an incremental and bidirectional process through which students actively perceive and engage existing power structures to persist and even thrive amid incredibly trying, challenging, distressing, and even traumatic circumstances. Our findings suggest that successful institutional interventional strategies designed to serve this functionally unique student population (and particularly those tailored to the COVID-moment) would do well to listen deeply to their voices, consider the secondary consequences of “protectionary” policies as potentially more harmful than helpful, and fundamentally, to reexamine the presumption that such students present just institutional risk and vulnerability, but also present a valuable addition to university environments, due to the unique perspective and broader scale of vision their experiences afford them.

This chapter reports on findings from a study that explored the experiences of African American young men who graduated from Du Bois Academy, an all-boys public charter secondary school in the Midwestern region of the United States. The chapter considers issues of African American male persistence and achievement and how they are impacted by school culture. Specifically, the author discusses how school culture can help shape these students’ educational experiences and aspirations. Using student narratives as the guide, a description of how Du Bois Academy successfully engaged these African American male students is provided. The students articulated three critical components of school culture that positively shaped their high achievement and engagement: (a) sense of self, (b) promotion of excellence, and (c) community building. The student narratives provided a frame for promoting positive school culture that enhances the educational experiences and academic aspirations of African American male students.