Public schooling in the Unites States of America has long been the site of more than just meeting the academic needs of the country’s youth. Among the many roles the school house has played in the history of public schooling in the United States is the mechanism to deliver non-instructional services to students. School-delivered, non-instructional services are those services that extend beyond addressing the academically-disposed, educational needs of children and aim to meet the social, emotional, and physical needs of young people while they are in the care of educators. Through an historical example grounded primarily in archival research, I establish a genealogy of school-delivered, non-instructional services by examining how staffing developed in the Cobb County School District in Cobb County, Georgia during the 1938-39 to 1976-77 time period. I will point to the role of federal involvement in public education and the professionalization of social services during this time period to connect the changes that occur in the instructional employees and non-instructional employees, with a specific examination of lunchroom employees and counselors, in one school system.

Throughout the years the admission of Hispanic and or Latinx students to colleges and universities has risen dramatically. So much so that the relatively new concept of an HSI (Hispanic Serving Institute) was created; meaning that at least 25% of the student population of a university is Hispanic. This advancement for this Hispanic community is a huge advancement for the overall community, but how many of these Hispanic students are aware of the academic services that these universities offer. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between the awareness of academic services and the participation and or engagement of those services amongst Hispanic, Latinx, and First-generation students. For this study 300, University of Central Florida students were asked to fill out a survey to further understand the awareness and participation of academic services at the University of Central Florida. This study was distributed through Qualtrics. Certain questions used a Likert scale and a combination of multiple-choice and open-ended questions to find out information on the engagement and or participation of services. I hypothesized that Hispanic and or Latinx students, once they are made to be aware of these academic services, the more likely they will participate and continue to engage in these services that are being offered to them. The expected findings for this study are that there as there is an increase in the awareness of services offered, the participation of those services will increase amongst the Hispanic student body. This information will be significant because it can help the university understand where they can improve to help their rapidly growing Hispanic population; this study can also be used to figure out what policies or other further implications that are needed to be created to help the Latinx population.

Education and academic related services have become as important as manufacturing and, in some cases, even more important. Considering the importance of these services as it relates to manufacturing, a problem exists. Products such as education and academic services are far less specific in value when comparing with manufactured goods, even though their quality depends on resources which can be measured, such as funding. At the same time, we must be able to quantify them and compare their values with predetermined expected levels for each area of expertise, as well as with each other. The quality of the services provided, specifically academic services, is an intangible concept that can be assessed through various methods. This research study applies the Academic Services Experience Survey, a modified version of SERVQUAL, to solve a complex and multifaceted problem of assessing and improving the quality of academic services in higher education institutions.

As online education grows, institutions must develop and evaluate student services to meet the needs of adult online students. The university at which the study was conducted had growing online enrollment, but no systematic examination of services from the students' perspective to drive service development and improvement. This represented a gap in self-evaluation, and the research confirmed gaps in student service offerings at the university compared to field standards. The purpose of this project study was to drive improvement of online student services based on analysis of student-driven data. The research questions asked how important academic and support services were to the university's online students and how satisfied the students were with the services. This quantitative study used the Priorities Survey for Online Students based on the expectation disconfirmation theory to collect data. The survey was sent to all of the university's 477 online undergraduate and graduate students. Descriptive statistics were used to compare the university's student responses to national data, report areas of service challenge, and assess variation in satisfaction according to previous online education experience. Key findings included lower than national mean satisfaction with career and tutoring services, challenge areas related to Blackboard preparedness, clarity of program requirements and communication channels, and lower levels of satisfaction with the most experienced online students. A presentation and white paper project were created for the university leadership with recommendations for using study results to improve and develop online student services. Social change is expected through improved and expanded online student services as a result of the project study.

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