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In 2003, Howard surveyed African Americans with emphasis on academic identities and college aspirations. This investigator interviewed African-American students at two urban high schools to gain insight relative to their college ambitions, educational capabilities, and academic identities. According to the students interviewed one specific area that affected their academic identity and college aspirations was perceived racism and discrimination, including counselors’ and teachers’ perception of their intelligence, unfair placement in special needs courses, and teachers’ attitude and behavior toward students (Howard, 2003).

Service firms constantly look for ways to differentiate their offering. Recently, personal values have emerged as a way to understand how customers fulfill deeper needs when consuming a service. This paper aims to examine how personal values operate in the evaluation of higher education services. Like other services, marketing has become essential to higher education as universities compete aggressively for students and differentiate their service offerings. Although attribute‐based measures such as SERVQUAL provide useful information to service providers, personal values may offer a deeper understanding of how customers judge the quality and desirability of an educational institution's services. This study seeks to determine whether personal values in higher education affect perceptions of overall value, satisfaction, and behavioral outcomes including loyalty and intention to recommend.

A survey measured student personal values, service quality, satisfaction, and behavioral outcomes in the USA – the largest exporter of higher educational service, and India – the largest net importer. Data were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis, path analysis, and t‐tests.

The results describe the impact of personal values on satisfaction and behavioral outcomes, while showing differences between India and the USA.

The paper provides implications for applying the personal values concept to the marketing of a university. It also serves as a basis for future research on the impact of personal values in other service sectors.

The study fills an important gap in the literature by showing that personal values are an important dimension in services. Service firms need to move beyond attributes and measure personal values, as these values do impact customer satisfaction and loyalty.

This paper seeks to problematize common assumptions in the existing workplace learning literature, to the effect that college‐based and workplace learning are inherently different.

The paper is based on empirical data from four different research projects, two focusing on the workplace and two on college. The approach is one of arguing that the differences between college‐based and workplace learning are exaggerated by the theoretical and conceptual stances that are often adopted.

From a rather different theoretical approach, many significant similarities between learning in the two types of location are revealed. The paper advances a way to reconceptualize the relationship between the two, based on this approach. There are two parts to this: changing one's view of the learner progression from one location to another, and studying the nature of the relationship between sites of workplace and educational learning, within their wider field(s).

Differentiating these learning processes has theoretical implications and a practical significance for organizations wanting to focus on competence and learning issues.

Highlights that the tasks of managing learning progression require detailed attention to the specifics of particular situations, which are often more important than generalized principles.

The prediction of graduation rates of college students has become increasingly important to colleges and universities across the USA and the world. Graduation rates, also referred to as completion rates, directly impact university rankings and represent a measurement of institutional performance and student success. In recent years, there has been a concerted effort by federal and state governments to increase the transparency and accountability of institutions, making “graduation rates” an important and challenging university goal. In line with this, the main purpose of this paper is to propose a hybrid data analytic approach which can be flexibly implemented not only in the USA but also at various colleges across the world which would help predict the graduation status of undergraduate students due to its generic nature. It is also aimed at providing a means of determining and ranking the critical factors of graduation status.

This study focuses on developing a novel hybrid data analytic approach to predict the degree completion of undergraduate students at a four-year public university in the USA. Via the deployment of the proposed methodology, the data were analyzed using three popular data mining classifications methods (i.e. decision trees, artificial neural networks, and support vector machines) to develop predictive degree completion models. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is performed to identify the relative importance of each predictor factor driving the graduation.

The sensitivity analysis of the most critical factors in predicting graduation rates is determined to be fall-term grade-point average, housing status (on campus or commuter), and which high school the student attended. The least influential factors of graduation status are ethnicity, whether or not a student had work study, and whether or not a student applied for financial aid. All three data analytic models yielded high accuracies ranging from 71.56 to 77.61 percent, which validates the proposed model.

This study presents uniqueness in that it presents an unbiased means of determining the driving factors of college graduation status with a flexible and powerful hybrid methodology to be implemented at other similar decision-making settings.

Limited research exists that assesses the transfer of leadership learning from an undergraduate leadership program into alumni work environments. This study explored alumni’ valuation of an undergraduate leadership program by gaining an understanding of what leadership learning and leadership behaviors transferred into work environments. The participants were alumni that graduated from the same university in the southeastern United States, and while enrolled completed a four-year, co-curricular leadership program. Eight participant alumni engaged in semi-structured interviews as well as completed the Leadership Practices Inventory. The findings indicated that specific leadership learning did effectively transfer to work environments, and program alumni were frequently engaged in the Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership at work to some degree. When developing leadership programs, practitioners may consider incorporating similar programmatic attributes and leadership learning deemed valuable by program alumni.

Discusses the profile of a learning organization as described by Senge. Describes the current organizational status of Brooksby College, Leicestershire, UK, in relation to a college‐devised quality assurance programme (QAP). Then applies the results of this research to Senge’s profile of a learning organization to show that Brooksby College has the attributes, and means, of becoming a learning organization. Further shows that the vehicle for this development is the QAP.

The purpose of this paper is to examine student, program and institutional support characteristics that relate to cohort intent to persist among Professional Golfers’ Association Golf Management University Program (PGA-GMUP) undergraduate students from 12 universities.

A survey instrument was created and disseminated to the targeted population. Multiple regressions were used to analyze the 473 responses of students’ intention to persist across the three independent variables (student, program and institutional support).

The research findings suggest higher levels of college GPA, career goals specific to the student’s desire to become a PGA professional, higher levels of faculty engagement, higher levels of satisfaction with major, being a leader in the student association and involvement in the student association are related to students’ intent to persist. Conversely, the results suggest career goals focused on being happy instead of graduation or working as a PGA professional and finding it difficult to make friends are associated with lower levels of intention to persist, while parental expectations of advanced degrees negatively affected students’ intent to persist. Additionally, passing a player ability test did not have bearing on intention to persist.

Results from this analysis offer insight into which persistence factors lead to students’ matriculation, with the ultimate goal of program completion. Identifying persistence factors may help PGA-GMUPs and other hospitality programs recruit students that are more likely to persist in the program, develop program characteristics that optimize cohort matriculation, and utilize university or institutional support services characteristics that may ensure program completion.

The first community college, Joliet Junior College, was founded in 1901 by William Rainey Harper, an early president of the University of Chicago as a means of providing an associate degree for students (Geller, 2001). As with many higher education institutions of that period, enrollment was limited to a select group. With the introduction of the G. I. Bill after World War II, community colleges began to thrive in the United States as more servicemen began to pursue training. Researchers suggest that community colleges have evolved through various stages: extension of secondary schools, junior colleges, community colleges, comprehensive community colleges, and now learning community colleges (O'Banion, 1997; Tillery & Deegan, 1985). Consistently, the public community college has at the core of its mission a focus on access – open admission regardless of ethnicity, gender, or social economic status. This open admission policy contributes to the attractiveness of community colleges for many students, particularly adults and women. They were designed to meet students at their individual point of entry and help to prepare them for the workforce or transfer to a Baccalaureate degree granting institution (Lanni, 1997). They offer flexible course scheduling, lower educational costs, smaller classroom settings, and more intimate contact with faculty and staff members than many of the larger universities (Lundberg, 2003; Ness, 2003). Additionally, they provide occupational training for individuals seeking to increase employability skills, as well as educational opportunities for underprepared students in a diverse environment.

This study aims at assessing item fairness in students' evaluation of teaching based on students' academic college using measurement invariance analysis (MI).

The sample of this study consists of 17,270 undergraduate students from 12 different academic colleges. SET survey consists of 20 Likert-type items distributed to four factors: planning, instruction, management and assessment was used to collect the data. The Lavaan R package with confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to evaluate measurement invariance (MI). Four models of CFA were investigated and assessed: the configural model, the metric model, the scalar model and the residual invariance model. ANOVA was used to test the differences in SET according to academic colleges.

MI analysis showed that the four levels of MI models are supported. ANOVA test showed that means of SET total scores are statistically different according to students' academic colleges. College of “Education” has the highest SET mean (88.64 out of 100), and all the differences between the College of Education’s SET mean and other colleges' SET means are statistically significant.

The study recommends that higher education institutions test the MI of SET according to academic colleges and then use colleges with the highest SET at the university level as internal benchmarking to develop and enhance their teaching practices.

This study is probably the only study that tested MI according to students' colleges before testing the differences between colleges in SET. If MI is not supported, then the comparisons between academic colleges are not applicable.

For much of its 43-year history, the community college sector in Jamaica has been plagued by perceptions of inferior status and mediocre tertiary education offerings. The Jamaican colleges have responded to the criticisms by aggressively pursuing quality assurance initiatives such as program accreditation, expanded course offerings, and ongoing curriculum review. This chapter traces the birth and development of the community college movement in Jamaica and the Caribbean and acknowledges the significant achievement of the Jamaican colleges in increasing access to tertiary education. The chapter also examines threats to the open access policy that may have serious implications for education equity and quality. These include inadequate funding, limited infrastructure to support the curriculum, low enrolment of specialized groups, and unsatisfactory completion and graduation rates. Recommendations for policy and practice are proposed.