George Spencer

A growing number of students initially enroll at four-year institutions as “traditional” but encounter discontinuous college trajectories and an extended time-to-degree. Much is unknown, however, about these students, whom we define as post-traditional. Using Bourdieu’s conception of capital as a framework, our qualitative study examines what stands in the way of these students completing a bachelor’s degree on time and what helps them to finish. Using data from 40 post-traditional college graduates, we found that social isolation was a common barrier to persistence, compounding other difficulties with help-seeking and limited financial support. Post-traditional graduates were able to persist and overcome their obstacles by activating capital in the form of economic resources, acquiring bureaucratic know-how, and finding communities of support. By elucidating the complexities of post-traditional student experiences, we argue for higher education to embrace new policies and practices that improve how we serve the students often discussed as “nontraditional.”

Many high school students access dual enrollment at 2-year colleges, but the credits associated with their college-level courses may not transfer if they later matriculate to 4-year institutions as first-year undergraduates. In this study, we ask whether statewide articulation agreements can support the postsecondary success of participants by preserving the credits earned and facilitating academic momentum. Employing the administrative data of students in Georgia, we use a difference-in-differences approach to investigate the effect of the state’s 2012 policy on 4-year college undergraduates who participated in dual enrollment at 2-year colleges. We find a positive impact of the policy on timely degree completion, but the effect is conditional, as it applied only to students who completed the coursework identified by the articulation agreement.

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Over the past two decades, higher education research has built a consensus that engaging with coursework on race is beneficial to students’ socioemotional and cognitive development. Paradoxically, we do not have clarity as to what that means, specifically. Most studies exploring the association between diversity courses and the development of students’ racial understanding examine a variety of dependent variables and consider combinations of outcomes – attitudinal, behavior and cognitive – that, while related, are distinct. This heterogeneity of results is a challenge for institutions of higher education, researchers, and practitioners. This study addresses that challenge by narrowing the scope of inquiry. We focus on Ethnic Studies courses in particular, and on their effect on two distinct types of racial attitudes: students’ understanding of structural racism, and students’ cross-racial empathy. Employing data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen (NLSF), we address a persistent methodological challenge in the research by employing propensity score matching to statistically control for self-selection bias. We find that while there is some association between Ethnic Studies course-taking and racial attitudes, the relationship varies across different types of Ethnic Studies courses.