No description available.

Among ethnic groups in California Latinos continue to have the lowest high school graduation rates and the lowest college completion rates. This study focused on understanding the role parents can play and ways schools and educators can support immigrant Latino parents to improve these rates. Framed with a funds of knowledge approach (Gonzalez, N., Moll, L., & Amanti, C., 2005), this mixed-methods qualitative and quantitative study was conducted in a public charter high school in a low income area of Los Angeles where the student body was primarily Latino. The mission of the school was to prepare students for higher education at a four-year institution. The study results showed that it is possible for a school to engage immigrant Latino parents. With a better understanding of the aspirations, fears, and challenges faced by this community, the information can be provided in a form that is meaningful and that builds upon existing funds of knowledge. Critical components of the college outreach program were seeking parent input, developing a parent outreach plan, making information accessible, encouraging parent college visits, disseminating information beginning in middle school, providing personalized guidance, developing an undocumented student support plan, and creating a college-going culture. Implementing the the college access program encompassed gathering informal and formal feedback, presenting workshops, making documents available in Spanish as well as English, defining terms, arranging college visits, sending and displaying motivating communications, and engaging staff, students, and parents every step of the way.

The role of school culture in facilitating underrepresented students' access to and success in college is examined in this ethnographic study. The purpose of this study is to examine an urban, public high school's culture in the southeast region of the United States with a high population of African Americans and students living in poverty. The college-­ going culture theory proposed by McClafferty, McDonough and Nunez (2002) and later refined by McDonough (2006) is used as a framework for this study and an ethnographic research design is employed using interviews, observations, open-­ended surveys, and document review as data collection methods. The objective of the study is to describe the culture of an urban high school by examining its artifacts, values and beliefs and underlying assumptions, specifically as it relates to preparation of students for postsecondary education. Findings from this study will help inform strategies on reforming school culture to support college access and success for urban high school students, and will support the use of the college-­going culture theory as a useful lens through which to understand college access issues. Additionally, this study helps to describe some of the common characteristics of urban education in the heart of education reform and describes the core challenges associated with developing college-­going culture in urban communities with high poverty and low college attendance rates.

Thesis advisor: Jacqueline Lerner / Americans are more educated than ever, and high educational attainment has long been associated with positive outcomes for individuals and society as a whole. However, one-third of high school students do not enroll in post-secondary education immediately after graduation, thereby reducing potential benefits. A thorough understanding of college enrollment patterns is needed to develop and enhance interventions that will effectively promote immediate college enrollment. Extant literature on college access focuses largely on contextual factors that influence college enrollment, such as families, schools, and classrooms. Given that context is only one component of development, additional research on the role of the individual may be especially useful for understanding more fully the transition from high school to college. For this dissertation, theoretical approaches from higher education and developmental psychology were combined to provide a new framework for exploring immediate college enrollment. The variables of interest included indicators of college readiness (e.g., academic preparedness and sources of college information) and three internal assets: self-regulation, school engagement, and expectations for academic success. College enrollment patterns were examined using data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, which surveyed students nationwide in 2002 (Grade 10), 2004 (Grade 12), 2006, and 2012. A series of multinomial regression equations revealed significant main effects and indirect effects of internal assets on college enrollment through college readiness variables, but no interaction effects between internal assets and college readiness variables. Analyses also provided support for previous findings related to racial/ethnic and socio-economic group differences, as well as school-level contextual factors. The findings from this study have valuable implications for college access programs: internal assets appear to be driving college readiness, not merely bolstering it, and should be a focus for interventional efforts. Additional research across applied settings for youth is needed to replicate and extend the findings from the current study, to evaluate applicable measurement standards, and to propose reform in practice and policy. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Counseling, Developmental and Educational Psychology.

The "college-for-all" norm encourages all students to attend college, and while rising college ambitions point to the effectiveness of this encouragement, differences by race and income in who goes to the most selective institutions and who actually graduates from those institutions point to persistent inequalities. With few exceptions, the majority of research on college access has focused more on documenting these inequalities and less on explaining how students end up in their respective institutions. In particular, we lack in-depth examinations of how students navigate the college admissions process, which represents one of the last hurdles between students and college attendance. Considering the increasingly complex nature of college admissions, especially for the most elite schools, the application process is a key gate-keeping mechanism in the reproduction of inequality in higher education, both in terms of who attends college and whether or not they finish (vertical stratification) and what kind of school they enroll in (horizontal stratification). My dissertation delves into this process and finds that institutions such as universities and high schools tend to reinforce disadvantages by failing to adjust their messages for different student populations. All students in my study are fed high college aspirations, but not all have the same "college knowledge." When less advantaged students attempt to pursue the dominant college pathway, like they see so many of their peers successfully navigating, they meet with unrealized aspirations and college "under-matching." Though interest in under-matching and horizontal stratification in higher education is growing, we know very little about the processes that lead to these outcomes. Drawing on extensive field research at two high schools and interviews with 137 respondents, I examine the three stages of the college-choice process – aspirations, search, and choice. I examine how institutional forces, such as high school organization and culture and higher educational marketing, lead students to engage in the college application process in very different ways during each of the three stages. I argue that the first step towards understanding more about why low-income and minority students struggle to graduate college is to look at the circumstances under which they made their college choices. / Sociology

The purpose of this story rug is to acquire a deeper understanding of 10 Navajo students' experiences as they journey toward college. Utilizing Indigenous theoretical frameworks including Tribal Critical Race Theory, Cultural Resilience, and Cultural Threads, this story rug centered attention on the systematic, structural forces and students' sources of strength that have shaped and continue to influence educational pathways for Navajo students. This story rug was guided by a qualitative mixed-method approach including Indigenous Storywork and narrative analysis. Through the assertion of the Navajo traditional oral story of the Twin Warriors, this story rug weaves in 10 Navajo students' experiences including the sociocultural and personal barriers, referred to as "monsters," that hindered their life and their college enrollment goals, how they internalized those "monsters," and then what were the sources of strength, referred to as "weapons," that guided them in life and toward college. The findings revealed systematic and personal monsters that intertwined within community, school, family, and self. The Financial Hardship Monster illustrated the struggles of poverty and its influence on students' educational aspirations. The Addiction Monster revealed how alcohol and drugs within community and family shaped students' pre-college journey. The Educational Deficit Monster uncovered Reservation schooling challenges that limited students' academic ability and college access. The final and more intimate monster, The Personal Struggles Monster, shed light on private and often unspoken challenges that students faced during a crucial time in the college-choice process. To overcome the monsters, students activated powerful weapons. The first set of weapons, Trusting Relationships and Vulnerability, entailed students' awareness of lessons learned during vulnerable moments and stories shared with mothers, grandmothers, and teachers. The Courage to Challenge Self weapons demonstrated that participation in college readiness opportunities and applying to high-stakes scholarships affirmed confidence that they were college material. The Transforming Obstacles to Positives weapons uncovered students' abilities to transform negative conditions into positive intentions, which motivated them to continue their journeys toward college. The final weapons, Faith in Spiritual Teachings, were spiritual and traditional teachings that reminded students that they were not alone and that they were unstoppable in proceeding toward college. This study underscored how context matters and penetrated in students' lives including systematic poverty, structural forces that fueled addiction, and systematic educational deficit and meritocracy ideologies. These stories have the power to transform discourses of deficiency to those of strength and honor for future Native student warriors and their educational attainment.

This study examined the use of information sources in college choice processing of historically-under-represented students from four different types of colleges who traditionally have not been studied in previous research. Historically under-represented types of students included students who were older than 24 years of age, African-Americans, Latinos, and low SES. The four types of colleges included a traditional public university, public community college, proprietary university, and proprietary college. Students from similar college programs of study were surveyed regarding their demographics to determine their categorization as historically under-represented and their use of information sources. Administrators from the selected colleges were interviewed and surveyed. Five students from each college were then interviewed. While most college choice processing research and the development of models are based on traditional college students, this study demonstrated that historically under-represented students generally utilize information sources and perform their college choice processing differently from traditional college students. These differences question the applicability of college choice processing models, such as Hossler and Gallagher's three stage model, without revisions. These revisions include redefinition of the stages and how they are executed in order to embrace the lack of college choices of historically under-represented students due to their lack of college informational motivators. The use of alternate information sources by historically-under-represented students and their motivational impact that differ from those utilized by traditional college students demonstrated the need to employ these sources within traditional colleges in order to increase college access for historically-under-represented students. This includes the utilization of non-traditional college informational motivators, such as the media, spouses, employers, and children, access to college informational motivators for students and their parents at all levels of schooling, and greater college access for older adults/parents. This study provided evidence that historically-underrepresented students still experience deficiencies in their access to college due to their lack of access to traditional information sources and their resulting compensation by utilizing alternative sources which were motivational as well as informational.

This dissertation is a critical ethnographic study of institutional, ideological, and cultural factors influencing the educational pathways of low-income Latino/a students. The study lasted for nine months, and research was conducted in two field sites: a public high school and a public university in the Southwest. There were eighteen research participants--seventeen students and one teacher. A funds of knowledge approach combined with a Latino/a Critical Theory lens and best practices in college access allow a consideration of these factors in public schooling. I balanced institutional data with interviews, writing samples, and class discussions, and I found that factors hindering students' persistence included material conditions such as overcrowding, ideological constraints such as low expectations, and a cultural disconnect between students' values and the values embedded in school curricula and policies. Although these Latino/a students demonstrate experiential critical literacy, the students are not given an opportunity to connect their lived experiences to theory in school, which can hinder college-going attitudes. To foster critical democracy, practitioners of First-Year Composition have an opportunity to rethink our purpose and goals to make sure that what we advocate in theory--college persistence for all students--matches up with our practice. This study suggests remedies to ensure that in a system in which social, economic, and political inequities are fed by and feed our inequitable educational system, we can take an active role in reshaping the educational pipeline by working in partnership with public schools and communities to bring equity to college access and retention efforts.

abstract: Compared to their urban and suburban counterparts, rural students have lower college enrollment rates. Despite many school and community benefits including small class sizes, close student-teacher relationships, and strong connections among community members, many rural high school students’ post-secondary educational opportunities are constrained by factors such as: fewer college preparatory courses, narrow school curriculums, geographic isolation, high poverty rates, and limited access to college and career counseling. This action research study was conducted to examine how and to what extent underserved rural high school students constructed college-going capital through their participation in an English class designed to supplement their school’s limited college-access services. The study took place over a 19-week semester at Seligman High School, a small rural school comprised of approximately 55 students. To support their construction of college-going capital, students’ junior- and senior-level English class curriculums blended traditional college preparation activities with college-level reading and writing assignments focused on the U.S. educational system and its college-access inequities. The theoretical perspectives that framed this study included: social cognitive career theory, sociocultural theory, and critical literacy. Further, research on perceived post-secondary educational barriers and supports, dialogic discourse, and college access informed the study. By using a concurrent, transformative mixed methods research design, both qualitative and quantitative data were collected simultaneously. Then, while maintaining an advocacy stance, the data were analyzed separately and brought together to determine convergences and divergences. Drawing data from student surveys, student and researcher journal entries, student and college coach interviews, dialogic discussion transcripts, and an image elicitation process, this study showed that, through their participation in an English language arts college-going class, students developed college-going skills, knowledge, self-efficacy, and critical literacy. The study also revealed the following: students acquired varying levels of critical consciousness; students benefited from adult mentors coaching them about college-going; and students did not experience significant changes in their perceptions of barriers to and supports for college-going during their participation in the course. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Educational Administration and Supervision 2015

Diné (Navajo) students drop out of high school and postsecondary education at higher than average rates. The purpose of this study was to investigate how Diné students currently enrolled in college describe the factors that supported their pursuit of higher education. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory was used as a framework and to identify and analyze factors that influence access, enrollment, and participation in higher education. The Diné participants in this study were six students enrolled in postsecondary education at the time of this research, recruited from two university campuses in the Southwestern U.S. Each student participated in a semistructured interview and completed a demographic questionnaire. Open-coding was used to analyze the interviews, and it was observed that factors relating to each of Bronfenbrenner’s five levels of ecological systems theory had an impact on the participants’ access, enrollment, and persistence in postsecondary education. A number of themes emerged that will be useful to stakeholders who work with this population of students. Recommendations are provided that are intended to help these stakeholders retain Diné students at higher rates.