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The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the value of internship as a function of the disparity between the initial expectation from the internship and its actual experience. The perceived internship experience has been evaluated through the expectation confirmation theory (ECT).

A sample of 106 students pursuing Master of Business Administration in a business school in India were administered a questionnaire to assess their expectations and experience before and after the internship. The self-designed questionnaire based on review of extant literature on internship included items related to supervisor–intern exchanges, significance of prior classroom academic preparation, prior work experience and perceived learning value. Students’ assessment scores on the internship project were taken as the outcome variable.

Pre- and post-analysis of perceived internship value indicated a positive expectation disconfirmation. The result indicates that “Positive Expectation Disconfirmation” has a significant direct relationship with overall satisfaction with internship. Structural equation modeling further revealed that perceived quality of the supervisor–intern exchange has a significant relationship with perceived internship value. Perceived significance of classroom academic preparation has a weak negative relationship with both perceived internship value and internship performance. Perceived internship value has a weak positive relationship with internship performance.

It is first time an attempt has been made to look into the issue of internship from the ECT.

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.

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.

This chapter provides a comprehensive review of research literature on teacher licensure and teacher competence. Since little research is available on teachers of students with learning and behavioral disabilities, a review of the general education literature is undertaken to provide implications for research in special education. Finally, a review of a recent study of special education teachers is provided. Implications are drawn for both elementary and secondary teachers of students with learning and behavioral disabilities.

The number of nontraditional students continues to rise on college campuses across the nation, with women outnumbering males. In spite of their growing presence at institutions of higher education, nontraditional students have low retention and graduation rates (Taniguchi & Kaufman, 2005). Since Black women comprise a large part of this population and face a number of the stressors that often serve as deterrents to the successful completion of their undergraduate degrees, this study aims to tell the stories of five selected nontraditional Black female students attending a predominantly White Ivy-league institution by examining the challenges they faced and the factors that contributed to the academic success of these women. For the purpose of this study, academic success is defined as having completed baccalaureate degree requirements and graduated with a B- or higher average or the equivalent 2.75 grade point index (GPA). This chapter hopes to address the question: What is it that enables some Black women to face the daunting challenges in their lives, attend a rigorous Ivy-league school, and still obtain their bachelor's degree? The answers to this question should enable policy makers and school administrators to implement programs and practices that will improve the retention and graduation rates of all nontraditional students.

This chapter explores the potential of African American male faculty and staff members to serve as mentors to high-profile African American male student-athletes at large, predominantly White institutions (PWIs) of higher education. These students are a large and very visible subset of the African American male student population at these institutions and often influence how African American male students are viewed and treated by other faculty, students, and the university communities at large. Based on empirical research and combined classroom and administrative experience of over 35 years, this chapter will present the issues that African American male student-athletes face as they transition into these institutions utilizing the athletic identity, transition, and mentoring frameworks and provide solutions for administrators and faculty members to use in their efforts to help guide these students toward achieving athletic, academic, and personal success.

This chapter uses a college-by-graduate degree fixed effects estimator to evaluate the returns to 19 different graduate degrees for men and women. We find substantial variation across degrees, and evidence that OLS overestimates the returns to degrees with the highest average earnings and underestimates the returns to degrees with the lowest average earnings. Second, we decompose the impacts on earnings into effects on wage rates and effects on hours. For most degrees, the earnings gains come from increased wage rates, though hours play an important role in some degrees, such as medicine, especially for women. Third, we estimate the net present value and internal rate of return for each degree, which account for the time and monetary costs of degrees. Finally, we provide descriptive evidence that satisfaction gains are large for some degrees with smaller economic returns, such as education and humanities degrees, especially for men.

This chapter investigates the impact of a teacher preparation program that includes specific attention to the needs of bilingual learners on participants’ subsequent teaching practices. Specifically, this mixed methods retrospective study examines graduates’ reports of their current teaching practices as well as their perceptions of the Teaching English Language Learners (TELL) program’s impact on these practices. Multiple-choice survey data were analyzed quantitatively to identify trends among reported practices and perceptions. Open-ended survey and interview data were analyzed qualitatively to identify interrelated themes within teachers’ detailed, first-hand accounts of their pre-service and in-service experiences. The results showed that there was variety with respect to whether particular linguistically responsive practices were routine, used occasionally, or rarely. There was also a difference with respect to whether such practices were perceived to be the result of having participated in the program. Notably, the most frequently used practices attributed to the TELL program involved teaching language (TL) to facilitate content learning. Other aspects of the teacher preparation program supported effective practices for academic content learning, but only TELL coursework and experiences facilitated practices that emphasized academic language development. These results suggest that programs created to improve the preparation of teachers to work with bilingual learners in mainstream classroom contexts must make a special effort to develop teachers’ skills in regard to language teaching, especially practices that focus on language beyond the word-level. There are limitations to the study because of the small number of participants and the fact that they were self-selected as program participants.

The purpose of this study is to identify what skills gained during PhD study are linked with preparation and differences between industry and academic positions.

Using student-level data from nearly 2,400 early career PhD alumni from 50 US PhD granting institutions, this study uses a generalized ordered logit model with partial proportional odds to test the main and conditional effects of 14 areas of skill development on perceptions of career preparation.

This study contributes empirical evidence to show that research skills and communicating with non-technical audiences are positively linked with job preparation.

The combination of sophisticated research and noncognitive skills promotes the idea of a well-rounded PhD – a highly skilled and versatile researcher that can interact in both academic and industry settings – as a goal of doctoral education. The knowledge gained from this study will assist scholars and graduate educators, including faculty advisors, program directors, graduate deans, graduate education professionals and career development professionals to reconceptualize professional preparation for work in industry.

For-profit businesses, particularly start-up companies, are vital for economic development and many require PhD-level employees across research and management roles. Developing PhDs with the appropriate skills for industry will better align higher education and economic interests.

The wide scope of doctoral institutions allows for a quantitative approach not appropriate for single-institution case studies of doctoral career pathways research.