Developed in response to concerns that too few students were enrolling and succeeding in postsecondary education, early college high schools are small schools that blur the line between high school and college. This article presents results from a longitudinal experimental study comparing outcomes for students accepted to an early college through…

Over the past decade, the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) has been documenting what colleges and universities are doing to gather evidence about student learning and helping institutions to productively use assessment data to strengthen undergraduate education. NILOA also has been monitoring how institutions communicate…

In this paper Merry examines in detail the continued--and curious--popularity of religious schools in an otherwise "secular" twenty-first century Europe. To do this he considers a number of motivations underwriting the decision to place one's child in a religious school and delineates what are likely the best empirically supported…

This article reports on an evaluation of the University of Pennsylvania's doctorate in social work (DSW), the first of the newly emerging practice doctorates. The study sample was current students and program alumni. Data were from program records and from an online survey of DSW alumni with an 81.6% response rate. Overall, the program is…

While Irish elite schools have adopted some internationalising practices, international students are often erased from their "public faces". Based on interviews and analysis of schools' websites, this paper argues that Brooks and Waters' [2014. "The Hidden Internationalism of Elite English Schools." "Sociology,"…

This study examined the obstacles former foster youth faced during their undergraduate years at two highly selective public institutions in Southern California and the supports they say their universities provided to help them persist toward graduation. Former foster youth graduate college at a rate much lower than non-former foster youth. Extant…

Students are the nation's asset or natural resources who need to be educated to achieve their optimal level of development. They need to be properly nurtured to allow holistic development in all domains namely: physical, mental, social, emotional, and spiritual. This is crucial for the building of a strong and respectful nation and its…

Much of the recent Chilean educational debate and reform has centered around issues of higher education cost, debt burden, and availability of grants versus loans. This quantitative case study of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile sought to understand the longitudinal contributions of combinations of types of financial aid to persistence of…

An exploratory study of applicants who rejected admission to the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science (TAMS) is described in this article. TAMS is a residential early college entry program at the University of North Texas in Denton. Up to 600 mathematically talented sophomores apply to TAMS each year and among the 200 selectees, a predictable…

In this paper, I examine the impact of legacy status on admissions decisions at 30 highly selective colleges and universities. Unlike other quantitative studies addressing this topic, I use conditional logistic regression with fixed effects for colleges to draw conclusions about the impact of legacy status on admissions odds. By doing so, I…

Privileged benefaction in elite schools and the moral dilemmas, contradictions and power politics involved are the focus of this paper. The notion of "the gift" provides our analytical lens. We concentrate on two girls' schools--one in South Africa and one in England. These were both built, in various ways, on the British model of public…

In this study, we use detailed survey and institutional data from a prospective panel study of students attending a highly selective, private university to examine the effects of fraternity or sorority membership on a range of collegiate outcomes. Previous research has given insufficient attention to selection issues inherent in the study of…

Acceleration programs are challenging courses in which high school students can simultaneously earn credit toward a high school diploma and a college degree (dual credit). This study examined participation rates in acceleration programs and early college outcomes for the 2011 cohort of Minnesota high school graduates. Nearly half the graduates…

Many students enroll in less selective colleges than they are qualified to attend, despite low graduation rates at these institutions. Some scholars have argued that qualified students should enroll in the most selective colleges because they have greater resources to support student success. However, selective college attendance is endogenous, so…

The open access mission is central to the community college role and mission in higher education. Although initially implemented by four-year colleges and universities, adoption of formal enrollment management initiatives in community colleges is on the increase. Admission, matriculation, retention, and persistence are affected by enrollment…