The first-year seminar is designed to help new students maximize their potential to achieve academic success and to adjust responsibly to the individual and interpersonal challenges presented by college life. Past research suggests that there is a positive correlation between seminar participation and various student outcomes. While a myriad of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to confirm the predictive validity of several antecedents to students' early perceptions of future performance in collegiate courses. Design/methodology/approach: A non-experimental design was used to test a proposed model based on a review of relevant literature. Students completed surveys capturing the…

The school quasi-market in French-speaking Belgium is characterised by segregation. Efforts to apply measures that encourage greater social mixing have met with stiff resistance. In 2008 and 2009, turbulence was caused by the application of the "social mixing" law influencing the registration procedures. The purpose of this article is to…

In this paper, we examine the risk of social exclusion among the Swedish population from a longitudinal perspective. In the empirical analysis, a person is considered socially excluded if he or she suffers from at least two of the following six welfare problems: chronic unemployment, economic problems, health problems, experiences of threat or…

This article describes the social, linguistic and academic integration processes of immigrant students in an area of low-density immigration in Quebec, Canada. Interviews were conducted with 15 secondary school students who had been in the country for 2 months to 4 years, in order to get a wide sampling of their experiences of the process of…

Religious communities are important sources of bridging and bonding social capital that have varying implications for perceptions of social cohesion in rural areas. In particular, as well as cultivating cohesiveness more broadly, the bridging social capital associated within mainline religious communities may represent an especially important…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to discuss whether the availability of qualifications through work-based traineeships in Australia assists social inclusion. Design/methodology/approach: Industry case studies, of the finance and cleaning industries, were undertaken as part of a national research project on quality in traineeships. The two…

Residential learning communities often focus on easing first-year students' transitions to college by emphasizing the creation of peer social and academic relationships. However, this relational process is most often examined through analyzing individual student characteristics, behaviors, and attitudes. This study used network analysis to…

Estimating the persistence of first-time students from the first year to the second year of college is a growing social and financial concern. Studying how socioeconomic status affects year-to-year persistence may help to identify and assist those students who have socioeconomic profiles most likely to indicate challenges to year-to-year…

Immigrants' employment prospects depend on their underlying levels of education and technical skills as well as their ability to communicate as needed in the host-country language. Since basic language courses do not impart the host-country language skills necessary for success in the workplace, many governments on both sides of the Atlantic are…

Many factors affect students selecting a university to attend and almost as many factors that can present challenges once they enroll and begin attending classes. Once they start taking courses, the next challenge is completing them, and this can be particularly taxing for online students. In the case of online universities, quality assessment…

For English learners reclassifying to fluent English proficient signifies reaching a milestone indicating the ability to function in mainstream classes without support. Employing a longitudinal, multimethod approach, I describe patterns of reclassification using administrative data for 7 cohorts of students over 2 years in a large urban district.…

Background: Since the late 1960s, research has demonstrated repeatedly that students in lower tracks achieve less as they develop an antischool culture to overcome the status deprivation resulting from being in a lower track. In quantitative large-scale research, this antischool culture is usually assessed using poor academic attitudes or study…

Despite the growing ideological divisions, there has been a surprising political convergence on some issues related to urban policy, social services, and housing. From the spread of charter schools and school choice to the expansion of home ownership through financial deregulation, it is apparent that liberals and conservatives agree. Yet these…

Ongoing demographic, social, economic and cultural changes point to the dynamic and continually changing contexts of rural areas in Ireland and Northern Ireland. However, the influence of such changes on the lives of older people remains under-explored, particularly the question of how older people perceive, connect to and engage in their…