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Although our society has made college more universal through vastly increased access to postsecondary education, college completion has stagnated, and the return on a college degree varies by field of study. Therefore, gaining admission to college – even a four-year college – is no longer a guaranteed ticket to social mobility. As colleges and universities attract and enroll more diverse populations of students, the barriers to student success once enrolled remain prominent concerns. To explore stratification processes regarding student success, choice of major, and completion, interviews were conducted with 41 low-income students at a large research university. These interviews illustrate the ways that students’ aspirations are lowered after entering college and how the cooling-out process functions within STEM majors. The primary catalyst facilitating the lowering of student aspirations and migration out of STEM majors was negative experiences in introductory math and science courses. Students responded to this catalyst by either lowering their aspirations or changing their behavior to improve performance in those courses. Students who were able to persist in STEM majors had a family member or mentor who helped them to frame the problem as a reflection of their behavior, not their innate ability, and to strategize behavioral changes. Institutional agents played both the role of support which helped some students maintain their aspirations and the role of steering students out of STEM illustrating the importance of the messages we send as advisors, student affairs professionals, or faculty. These findings demonstrate the ways in which the cooling-out process works in four-year institutions to perpetuate structures of opportunity within degree attainment and access to elite careers.

Supplemental Instructions (SIs) were introduced into the San Francisco State University College of Science & Engineering curriculum in 1999. The goal was to improve student performance and retention and to decrease the time to degree in STEM majors. While for the most part we followed the structure and activities as developed by the International Center for Supplemental Instruction at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, we discovered several variations that significantly improved our outcomes. First and foremost, we created SI courses that require attendance, which results in higher students’ performance outcomes compared to drop-in options. Second, at SFSU the SI courses are led by pairs of undergraduate student facilitators (who are all STEM majors) trained in active learning strategies. Each year, more than half of our facilitators return to teach for another year. Thus, each section has a returning “experienced” facilitator who works with a new “novice” facilitator. Third, the SI courses were created with a distinct course prefix and listed as courses that generate revenue and make data access available for comparison studies. Results are presented that compare SI impact by gender and with groups underrepresented in STEM disciplines.

This chapter explores how participating in campus leadership at HBCUs positively affects African American college student experiences. A review of existing research about the benefits of leadership involvement for African American students is followed by a discussion of student leadership at HBCUs. Next, motivations for being involved as leaders are discussed and described. The chapter concludes with recommendations for bolstering student motivations and involvement outcomes, as well as ways to increase African American student leadership at HBCUs. Specifically, this chapter is informed by empirical data gathered during in-depth focus groups with 13 African American student leaders (7 males, 6 women) who occupied leadership roles at their HBCU institutions. Two emergent themes are discussed: (1) playing the game, which spoke to the development of their leadership competencies; and (2) getting something out of it, which focused on building the leadership capital afforded to them as a result of their leadership. Recommendations for bolstering motivations and involvement outcomes for Black leader collegians are described in detail at the end of the chapter to provide insight about best practices of support for this student demographic.

Studies of inequality in higher education on both undergraduate and graduate levels have rarely examined experiences of Asians and Pacific Islanders (APIs). In this study, we focus on the experiences and outcomes of API students in doctoral education. More specifically, we examine socialization experiences and research productivity of three groups of students: domestic API, international API, and domestic white students. The results, based on a national cohort of PhD students in biology, reveal notable differences in experiences and outcomes of domestic and international API students. Although variation in socialization experiences explains differences in research productivity in the first year, that is not the case in the second year of doctoral study. In the second year, international API students have publication productivity comparable to their white peers, despite less favorable socialization experiences. Domestic API students, however, have lower research productivity than their white peers, even though they have comparable socialization experiences. Given the presumption of APIs’ success, especially in the STEM fields, findings for domestic API students are surprising and not aligned with the model minority stereotype. Contributions to research on API students, doctoral education, and socialization theory are discussed.

This chapter explores the complexity of issues surrounding Black males and athletics in higher education. Multiple studies over the past decade and a half have depicted an oppositional relationship between athletics and academic achievement. Research suggests that media imagery, stereotyping, and other non-academic influences on African American males who participate in intercollegiate athletics tend to result in an over-identification with professional athletes, sports, and perceptions of great value associated with physical performance activities and a simultaneous under-identification with academic performance, scholarly identity, and student development. These pressures ultimately limit career options outside of athletics. In an effort to combat these issues, Beyond the Game™ (BTG) Program, a program described in this chapter that was developed in Wisconsin’s Equity and Inclusion Laboratory (Wei LAB) and implemented at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, seeks to harness curricular, co-curricular, and on-the-field leadership training to strategically develop and support post-graduation options. This comprehensive, multi-faceted program directly confronts the challenges student-athletes face when they exhaust their eligibility status but have yet to identify viable career alternatives to professional sports. This chapter explores the main tenants of the program, established with a group of Division 1 NCAA-affiliated college athletes as participants.

Female students comprise a significant number of the accounting student population at four-year institutions. Likewise, a significant number of students have chosen to enroll and earn associate degrees at a community college, and subsequently transfer to a four-year college or university. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, more than half of the students enrolled in two-year institutions were female. Moreover, 57% of college students in the United States are females. This study provides empirical evidence on the interaction between gender and transfer versus native accounting students in their academic performance during and after shock periods. According to the literature, the shock period includes two semesters after a two-year college student transfers to a four-year college. The results of this study indicate that female and male transfer students do not perform equally in their accounting courses compared to their native counterparts, that is, male transfer students in accounting performed worse than female transfer students and native students (male and female) both during and after the “shock” period. These findings may have practical implications for administrators and accounting departments since male transfer students appear to need more assistance to absorb transfer shock when they join four-year colleges and possibly even after their first year at the four-year institution.

The twenty-first century will be dominated by technological change as the United States competes in an increasingly interdependent world. If the United States is to maintain its technological leadership, an inclusive engineering education is required. Engineering impacts many important aspects of day-to-day life from the environment to national security and half of our graduate degrees in engineering are granted to foreign nationals. While this influx of creative talent enriches the academic community, the underutilization of domestic talent threatens the engineering enterprise with professional shortages in university classrooms, research facilities, and corporate boardrooms. We are simultaneously challenged with addressing the shrinking pool of African-American males in higher education. The challenge is daunting but not insurmountable. Many African-American students have aspirations for engineering without the preparation and the community college is well suited to provide the bridge between aspiration and accomplishment. Community colleges serve 46% of all African-American students in higher education and there are exemplary programs that have tapped the underdeveloped resources in the African-American community. One example is the Emerson Minority Engineering Scholarship Program. By utilizing best practices, this program has helped to increase the pool of African-American engineers by providing opportunities to students who may have made other academic choices. This paper reviews persistence literature and discusses the challenges and strategies in developing a community college-based minority engineering program.

I elected to be guided by Alexander Astin's (1984, 1985, 1993) theory of student involvement in examining the experiences of first-generation African-American women in the technology-driven classroom because it is one of the most used and time-tested theory in the college student development literature (Pascarella & Terenzini, 2005). Astin's theory has established that students learn by becoming involved with their peers and instructors in educationally purposeful activities. Given the onslaught of technology-driven teaching and learning practices and the literature that supports the importance of learning through interaction, examining their interactivity with the course content, faculty, and peers is an important topic to research.

This chapter draws on recent survey data from a multi-institutional sample to estimate the influence of sense of belonging (SOB) on learning and success outcomes for African-American (AA) students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Additional information highlights differences between men and women. Qualitative data from individual and group interviews are used to make meaning of the statistical findings, yielding insights that can be used to improve educational policies, practices, and conditions for AA students in STEM.

The authors draw upon the African proverb: “How Do You Eat an Elephant?” One Bite at a Time to couch emerging practices and programs connected to and within California community colleges that are specifically designed to counter historical and topical institutional neglect and exclusion one initiative at a time. To this end, we discuss the Umoja Community, Men of Ujima Manhood Development Program, and the African American Male Educational Network and Development (A²MEND) organization. The authors maintain that the study of Black men in general is in need of its own theoretical framework that can articulate their position and trajectory in the world drawing on and accounting for their pre- and post-enslavement experiences while capturing their spiritual, psychological, social, educational development and station. Thus, we first build upon critical race theory (CRT) and African-centered theory to construct an emergent conceptual approach that more accurately articulates the experiences of African American men in community colleges and that both explains the existence of the aforementioned independent educational programs and organizations and provides the framework to produce and maintain additional self-determined spaces. Beyond theory and research, however, the authors call community college educators to a personal accountability and action to create spaces, initiatives, programs, organizations, and institutions based on the conceptual framework outlined in this current chapter.