Impact of an Online Student Bridge Program for First-Year Nontraditional Students

Low retention rates for first-year students plague many higher education institutions, and are even lower among online institutions of higher education. At Athena Colleges (a pseudonym), the attrition rate can be as high as 50% in students\u27 first academic year. To address this concern, Athena Colleges has implemented an online bridge program that addresses students\u27 academic needs and persistence. The purpose of the study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the bridge program in reducing the first-time student attrition rate and academic performance in their first term. Most of Athena Colleges students are nontraditional students and due to this, the theoretical framework that guided this study was Malcolm Knowles\u27s theory of andragogy. The design of the study was a formative program evaluation using a quasi-experimental design to analyze the data, which measured the primary goal of the bridge program, the reduction of attrition of first-time students. The data used for this study was archival data provided by the institution. The data provided included academic program start date, enrollment status, secondary education credential earned, secondary credential award date, first-term GPA, bridge program status, and date of termination (if applicable) and consisted of 4,916 total records. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and an ANOVA by comparing the academic performance of students who participated in the bridge program to those who did not, using a 300 student sample size for each group. The results showed there was no statistical difference between the two groups for retention, but there was a statistical difference on first term GPA. The social change implication of this study indicates that faculty and administrators must ensure that remedial academic services are in place for students who enter online programs with knowledge and skill deficits

The Library in the Lives of Latino College Students

Libraries share a perception of embracing and providing for all users. However, they also share a common philosophical stance shaped by librarians' individual discursive formations and the dominant cultural hegemony that values some users over others. Latinos constitute one of the fastest-growing, nondominant populations in the United States, and the literature suggests that libraries do not always serve them adequately. This was reinforced by interviews with seven Latino undergraduate students that suggest ambiguous feelings toward libraries and a strong need for some sort of cultural reinforcement. This study of users' perceptions of libraries may help librarians and policy makers consider more pluralistic approaches to library services.Publisher's PDF (Embargo Over)Includes bibliographical references

Unintentional recruiting for diversity

Based on interviews with Latino undergraduate students, Latino and Native American graduate students in library and information science, and Latino librarians, this paper documents some techniques librarians unintentionally use to persuade or dissuade students from becoming librarians. These techniques include developing relationships with library patrons, helping patrons become familiar with the library, demonstrating librarianship as a service profession, and demonstrating librarianship as a respectful profession. When used intentionally, those techniques become strategies which can help librarians recruit for future generations.Post-printIncludes bibliographical references

Experimenting with Wellbeing: Basic Income, Immaterial Labour and Changing Forms of Productivity

This article is concerned with the recent (2017-2018) basic income experiment in Finland. This experiment attracted global attention, not least because of its break from the conditionalities and sanctions associated with social security payments in workfare states. This article stresses, however, that it is critical to understand how the Finnish basic income experiment was part of a broader programme of government-led reform in Finland. As well as establishing the experiment as a preferred mode of policymaking, this programme contained a range of strategies aimed at restructuring labour supply. The article shows how the basic income experiment should be understood as a behavioural intervention designed to enhance the wellbeing of unemployed populations at a time when wellbeing is emerging as a value-producing capacity

Economizing the political: Workfare reform in strategic management mode

The focus of this article is a recent round of workfare reform in Finland. Departing from many existing analyses of workfare, it focuses on issues of governance. Drawing on policy documents and interviews with key policy actors, it shows how this reform and attempts at implementation took place along the lines of a specific form of managerial governance, namely strategic governance, involving the enrolment of strategic management into policy making. The article details how this mode of policy making enabled an intensification and depoliticization of workfare policies via the replacement of political concerns with economic imperatives and in so doing contributed to the broader process of economization of the state. While the latter is often located as central to the project of neoliberalism, the practices through which it is instantiated often remain hazy. This article therefore contributes knowledge on how the process of the economization of the political operates in practice

Femininity work: The gendered politics of women managing violence in bar work

This paper explores how women bar workers manage violence at work. Women bar workers in our study described that the capacity to recognize, intervene, and defuse potentially violent situations was a pragmatic response to the problem of men's violence in the night-time economy. We analyze the gendered norms and expectations at play in how violence in bar work is managed by staff and locate this as a form of “femininity work” extending from the modes of attentive, emotionally-attuned femininity that labor feminist labor studies theorists have described. In a context where hospitality labor already makes complex and often unexamined demands on young workers, the positioning of women bar staff as being more adept at managing violent situations suggests a particularly important demand made of women bar workers, central for understanding the enduring gendered power relations in contemporary interactive service labor