A college education offers people social and economic benefits, yet youth from foster care backgrounds are less likely than their peers to attain a college education, which places this already vulnerable population at higher risk for a lifetime of living on the margins of society. Foster alumni face multiple obstacles to accessing and persisting in higher education. To facilitate and support the success of this frequently overlooked population, professionals in higher education need to understand these obstacles. Little is known about the experiences of youth with foster care backgrounds as they transition into and through higher education. Although existing research has reported the academic, health, and social effects of having been in foster care, little is known about why foster alumni do not persist in higher education. This study used student-development theory, specifically Schlossberg's transition theory, Tinto's theory of student departure, and Bourdieu's work on social and cultural capital to provide a conceptual framework through which to view the lived experiences of youth with foster care backgrounds. Because, for many youths with foster care backgrounds, the pathway to the baccalaureate degree is through a community college, this study examined and explored the transition experiences of foster alumni about to begin or currently enrolled at an Oregon Community College. The study explored the factors that challenge and facilitate foster alumni persistence towards the attainment of a college degree.

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This dissertation reports the findings of a comparative case study of English and Chinese academic writing with respect to the use of composing strategies, the patterns of written discourse organization, and questionnaire responses regarding educational background and attitudes toward writing.The subjects were eighteen traditional senior college students -- nine native speakers of English and nine native speakers of Chinese. Each subject was asked to write two essays on given topics with the think-aloud protocol method. While the protocol data showed that the composing strategies used by the American and Chinese subjects were similar, the American subjects used most of the strategies more frequently than the Chinese subjects did and there was a lack of group consistency in the use of these strategies among the subjects in the Chinese group. The written data, which were analyzed by means of Coe's (1988) discourse matrix method, showed that, contrary to prior claims, Chinese writing is not indirect in idea development in comparison to English writing. The questionnaire responses indicated that the subjects' composing performance was consonant with their instructors' methods of teaching writing and the curricula set up for teaching writing. Based on these findings, implications for contrastive research and EFL/ESL teaching are discussed and suggestions for further contrastive studies of English and Chinese writing are made. / Department of English

Access to abstract permanently restricted to Ball State community only / Access to thesis permanently restricted to Ball State community only / Department of Educational Studies

Higher education has always occupied an important place in this nation's concerns. This study was undertaken in an attempt to determine how the Founding Fathers, especially the nation's first six presidents, regarded the subject of higher education. The study was limited to these six men because they were charged with inaugurating the new government and because these six men were all participants in the drafting and ratifying of the Constitution. Findings for this study came from the personal and private papers of the first six presidents, government documents, and the press. A comparison of the findings indicates that these men shared many beliefs while disagreeing on some aspects of higher education.

The study is concerned with the recurrent diffusion of novelty in American higher education. By novelty is meant any body of thought, organizational form, and spontaneous phenomenon of collective behaviour which is perceived as new by members of academic institutions. The general thesis of the work is that the dissemination of novelty typically occurs along lines of decreasing academic prestige. This view is derived from a host of porpositions about the relationship of institutional prestige with academic talent, the creation and communication of novelty, the academic marketplace, permissiveness, imitation, and embarrassment. This thesis is verified for the interinstitutional diffusion of the antiwar student movement of the nineteen sixties and early seventies. The central' hypothesis of this case study is that the more prestigious an academic institution was at the time of the birth of the movement, the sooner some of its students initially protested against American involvement in the Vietnam war. Institutional prestige, the independent variable, is operationalized in terms of "objective" indices. The dependent variable is the degree to which students in an institution were relatively earlier in initially protesting than students in other institutions. The antiwar student protests used to test the hypothesis were collected from The New York Times Index. For each institution that was reported, only the first or earliest campus protest was considered. It is assumed that the criteria governing the newspaper's selection of protests were the same for the entire duration of the movement. Two counter-hypotheses are also examined. It is proposed that the larger an institution was at the time of the birth of the movement, the less time it took for some of its students to initially protest against the American involvement in the Vietnam war. It is also hypothesized that the older the institution, the longer it took before some of its students first protested against this military participation abroad. The results provide, at best, moderate support to the main hypothesis of the case study while flatly rejecting its counter-hypotheses. / Arts, Faculty of / Sociology, Department of / Graduate

Utilizing the theory of John Naisbitt's 1982 Megatrends, this study identifies eight trends for the future of higher education using content analysis of generalized print media reports for three bell-wether states. For the period of 2001-2005, generalized reporting for three newspapers, the Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, CA, the Miami Herald from Miami, FL, and the Denver Post from Denver, CO, included over four thousand articles and covered 21 primary topics and over 200 secondary topics. Eight trends emerge from the content analysis. Trend 1, from the ivory tower to the public domain, identifies increasingly critical public scrutiny of higher education standards and curricula. Fight or flight, Trend 2, reveals more consistent no-tolerance policies for student behavior. Trend 3, scholar to celebrity, reveals an increasingly public role for university presidents. Academic freedom to academic flexibility, Trend 4, identifies a tightening of academic freedom policies for university staff and faculty. Trend 5, pay now, learn later, focuses on increased popularity of pre-paid and tax free plans for saving college tuition. Fraternity party to fraternity accountability, Trend 6, identifies increased scrutiny of Greek organizations and Greek life within the university environment. Trend 7, tenure to temporary, reflects the growing trend of hiring more part-time faculty rather than hiring faculty for tenure track positions or full-time instructor jobs. Lastly, campus to cyberspace, Trend 8, identifies the continued success of online instruction at the university level.