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The issue of academic undermatching involves students enrolling at colleges and universities below the level of selectivity to which their academic profiles indicate they could gain admission. Undermatching has received significant attention because students who undermatch have been shown to experience less favorable outcomes than their peers who match, including lower levels of satisfaction with the college experience, lower graduation rates, lower rates of full-time employment, and lower annual incomes. Undermatching has also been found to occur with much greater frequency among various populations of students, including those of low socioeconomic status (SES), underrepresented racial and ethnic minority identities, and first-generation college students. The extant literature focuses almost exclusively on students from those groups. Research has also, however, identified a geographic component to undermatching, as rural students have been found to undermatch at significantly higher rates than their urban and suburban counterparts. Interestingly, rural students are less likely than nonrural students to attend selective institutions even after controlling for SES and academic preparedness, as well as other demographic and high school achievement variables. While the nature of the academic undermatching that occurs among rural students appears to be distinct from that which occurs among nonrural students, there are no qualitative studies focused on the intersection of rurality and academic matching. In fact, students from rural backgrounds are largely ignored in the broader literature on access and equity in higher education. This study seeks to address current gaps in the literature by focusing exclusively on rural students and employing a qualitative design to explore more deeply their college choice processes and experiences at a large urban public research university. / Educational Leadership

This qualitative multi-case study explored the experiences, motivation, and persistence factors for African American college students with basic needs issues while attending a four-year public, urban, predominantly white institution (PWI) in the Mid-Atlantic region. The study addressed two primary research questions: 1) What motivates Black students with basic needs challenges to persist in college? 2) How does experiencing basic needs challenges affect Black students' overall collegiate experiences? The data was collected through semi-structured interviews and observation data to gather first-hand experiences of five matriculated students in their last four semesters of undergraduate coursework and have faced some form of a basic needs problem, using sense of belonging as the conceptual framework. Through analysis of the data, insight was provided into the lived experiences of African American college students with basic needs challenges. Subsequently, seven major themes emerged: Motivation, Lived Experience, College Environment, Faculty and Staff Interactions, the COVID-19 Effect, The Struggle is Real (Resiliency), and Participant Advice. Finding suggests that African American college students’ motivation for seeking a degree is due to the ability to propel themselves out of their current situation, and the needed support from their institutions, faculty and staff, and families to overcome their basic needs challenges. Implications for practice and policy and areas of future research are discussed. / Educational Administration

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This study explores the teaching practices and labor conditions of media and communication adjunct faculty at three universities. Since the late 1960s, the number of faculty who are part-time and contingent is increasing and adjuncts are now more than 70% of college and university faculty (AAUP, n.d.). In this study, I examine the neoliberal university’s reliance on the teaching labor of part-time faculty and interrogate the use of adjunct labor for skills-based, vocationally oriented elements of the media and communication curriculum. The history of higher education, the literature of teaching and learning, and the theoretical frameworks of Bourdieu’s practice theory and Freire’s critical pedagogy situate this qualitative study of adjunct faculty teaching practices and labor conditions. A multi-method approach includes textual analysis of course syllabi and university documents; eight interviews with administrators, department chairs, sequence heads, course directors, and university leadership; three interviews with union activists; eleven interviews with current or former adjuncts; semester-long participant observation of teaching practices of thirteen courses taught by nine adjunct faculty; and three student focus groups with nineteen total participants. This study reveals media and communication adjuncts as key members of the academic community who apply student-centered practices and who are responsible for important elements of the curriculum, and at the same time, marginalized as a flexible, on-demand, and disposable labor force that serves the neoliberal university. This study offers insights to improve the labor conditions of adjunct faculty. I conclude that the COVID-19 global pandemic and the disruption of higher education’s normal tempo reveals a changing higher education landscape with threats of financial exigency and increased precarity for all faculty. / Media & Communication

This purpose of this study was to determine how students perceive and experience critical thinking in an undergraduate business curriculum and whether or not those perceptions and experiences are influenced by gender and academic discipline. This was a qualitative study that used focus groups and individual interviews to explore student experiences. There were a total of 22 participants, all of whom participated in a focus group. Of the 22 participants, seven participated in individual interviews. Focus group participants represented 11 majors at the business school and were split almost evenly along binary gender lines. The majority of interview participants were female, management information systems majors. Three major themes emerged from the data: critical thinking is a process, critical thinking is aided by interest in the subject matter, and technology use impacts critical thinking. Findings indicate that critical thinking is influenced by interest in the subject matter more than it is by academic discipline; however, findings linked to the influence of gender are inconclusive. Additional research is needed to more fully examine the influence of gender on student perception of critical thinking and how it intersects with academic discipline. Multiple implications for higher education practice, particularly as related to the Business School, emerged, including examination of pedagogical strategies, real-world applicability of course content, and the inclusion of experiential learning in the curriculum. / Educational Leadership

Despite the critical contributions that student affairs professionals make to college students' learning and development and campus operations, mid-level professionals are at risk of leaving the field altogether. The current study investigated the role of sense of belonging in mid-level student affairs professionals' experiences and their turnover intentions through a qualitative, phenomenological analysis. Ten mid-level student affairs professionals from various institutions were interviewed about how they experience belongingness within their work, and how their evaluation of belonging influences their intention to stay at their institution or in the field of student affairs. The results demonstrate that sense of belonging is experienced by mid-level student affairs professionals, but in varied ways, and it is shaped through relationships, being trusted for professional expertise and competence, and feeling supported by others. Salient identities, especially marginalized identities, can shape the experience of belonging as can professional networks outside of institutional experiences. Furthermore, the findings demonstrate that sense of belonging, whether it was experienced or lacking, influenced the intentions of many participants to stay at their institution and in the field of student affairs more broadly. Should colleges and universities be committed to addressing the attrition of mid-level student affairs professionals, they should commit to supporting and cultivating sense of belonging as it does indeed matter. / Policy, Organizational and Leadership Studies