Making the Transition to Four-Year Institutions: Academic Preparation and Transfer

In this study, we examine the role of academic preparation in the transition from community colleges to four-year institutions. We address two specific questions: To what extent do academically unprepared students transfer to four-year institutions? And, can positive experiences in community colleges diminish the role of inadequate academic preparation? The results, which are based on analyses of Florida's unit record data of first-time community college students, indicate that a substantial proportion of students who enter community colleges academically unprepared do indeed transfer to four-year institutions. Moreover, successful completion of intermediate outcomes—such as passing college-level math and writing courses, meeting specific credit thresholds, and earning an associate degree—enhances students' probability of transfer. However, the ability of community colleges to mitigate the negative effects of inadequate academic preparation is limited: successful completion of even the most demanding intermediate outcomes does not alleviate the negative consequences of entering higher education unprepared. The policy implications of these findings are discussed

Finding a Fit: Biological Science Doctoral Students’ Selection of a Principal Investigator and Research Laboratory

In the laboratory-based disciplines, selection of a principal investigator (PI) and research laboratory (lab) indelibly shapes doctoral students’ experiences and educational outcomes. Framed by the theoretical concept of person–environment fit from within a socialization model, we use an inductive, qualitative approach to explore how a sample of 42 early-stage doctoral students enrolled in biological sciences programs made decisions about fitting with a PI and within a lab. Results illuminated a complex array of factors that students considered in selecting a PI, including PI relationship, mentoring style, and professional stability. Further, with regard to students’ lab selection, peers and research projects played an important role. Students actively conceptualized trade-offs among various dimensions of fit. Our findings also revealed cases in which students did not secure a position in their first (or second) choice labs and had to consider their potential fit with suboptimal placements (in terms of their initial assessments). Thus, these students weighted different factors of fit against the reality of needing to secure financial support to continue in their doctoral programs. We conclude by presenting and framing implications for students, PIs, and doctoral programs, and recommend providing transparency and candor around the PI and lab selection processes

Time-to-Credit Gender Inequities of First-Year PhD Students in the Biological Sciences

Equitable gender representation is an important aspect of scientific workforce development to secure a sufficient number of individuals and a diversity of perspectives. Biology is the most gender equitable of all scientific fields by the marker of degree attainment, with 52.5% of PhDs awarded to women. However, equitable rates of degree completion do not translate into equitable attainment of faculty or postdoctoral positions, suggesting continued existence of gender inequalities. In a national cohort of 336 first-year PhD students in the biological sciences (i.e., microbiology, cellular biology, molecular biology, develop-mental biology, and genetics) from 53 research institutions, female participants logged significantly more research hours than males and were significantly more likely than males to attribute their work hours to the demands of their assigned projects over the course of the academic year. Despite this, males were 15% more likely to be listed as authors on published journal articles, indicating inequality in the ratio of time to credit. Given the cumulative advantage that accrues for students who publish early in their graduate careers and the central role that scholarly productivity plays in academic hiring decisions, these findings collectively point to a major potential source of persisting underrepresentation of women on university faculties in these fields

Strategies for Promoting Gatekeeper Course Success Among Students Needing Remediation: Research Report for the Virginia Community College System

The Virginia Community College System (VCCS) is engaged in a strategic planning process to improve performance beyond the goals in Dateline 2009, the system’s current vision and plan. A key objective is to encourage colleges to improve retention and academic success for students, particularly the substantial numbers who arrive unprepared for college-level work. Specifically, the VCCS seeks to improve the rates at which underprepared students complete developmental coursework and advance to take and pass college courses, particularly the initial college-level, or “gatekeeper,” math and English offerings. The VCCS asked the Community College Research Center (CCRC) at Teachers College, Columbia University, to conduct analyses to inform its efforts to improve student outcomes. In response, CCRC designed a study to address the following question: What student characteristics, course-taking patterns, and other factors are associated with higher probabilities that students who require remediation will take and pass college-level math and English? The dataset used by CCRC, provided by the VCCS, contained information on 24,140 first-time college students who enrolled in a VCCS college in summer or fall 2004. It included information on student demographics, institutions attended, placement test scores and placement recommendations, transcript data on courses and grades, and information on educational attainment (including transfer to four-year institutions and certificates and associate degrees earned). Students were followed for four years, through the 2008 summer term. CCRC examined a range of educational outcomes, including: whether students took and passed development courses and gatekeeper English and math, the number of terms they were enrolled, the number of credits they accumulated, and whether they earned educational awards (certificates and associate degrees) or transferred to four-year institutions. This report presents the main findings from CCRC’s study and outlines suggestions for steps that the VCCS and its member colleges might take to improve completion of gatekeeper courses by the many students who enter the state’s community colleges poorly prepared to succeed in college-level work

Postdocs’ Lab Engagement Predicts Trajectories of PhD Students’ Skill Development

The doctoral advisor—typically the principal investigator (PI)—is often characterized as a singular or primary mentor who guides students using a cognitive apprenticeship model. Alternatively, the “cascading mentorship” model describes the members of laboratories or research groups receiving mentorship from more senior laboratory members and providing it to more junior members (i.e., PIs mentor postdocs, postdocs mentor senior graduate students, senior students mentor junior students, etc.). Here we show that PIs’ laboratory and mentoring activities do not significantly predict students’ skill development trajectories, but the engagement of postdocs and senior graduate students in laboratory interactions do. We found that the cascading mentorship model accounts best for doctoral student skill development in a longitudinal study of 336 PhD students in the United States. Specifically, when postdocs and senior doctoral students actively participate in laboratory discussions, junior PhD students are over 4 times as likely to have positive skill development trajectories. Thus, postdocs disproportionately enhance the doctoral training enterprise, despite typically having no formal mentorship role. These findings also illustrate both the importance and the feasibility of identifying evidence-based practices in graduate education

Balancing Research and Service in Academia: Gender, Race, and Laboratory Tasks

Our study highlights specific ways in which race and gender create inequality in the workplace. Using in-depth interviews with 67 biology PhD students, we show how engagement with research and service varies by both gender and race. By considering the intersection between gender and race, we find not only that women biology graduate students do more service than men, but also that racial and ethnic minority men do more service than white men. White men benefit from a combination of racial and gender privilege, which places them in the most advantaged position with respect to protected research time and opportunities to build collaborations and networks beyond their labs. Racial/ethnic minority women emerge as uniquely disadvantaged in terms of their experiences relative to other groups. These findings illuminate how gendered organizations are also racialized, producing distinct experiences for women and men from different racial groups, and thus contribute to theorizing the intersectional nature of inequality in the workplace

Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses

In spite of soaring tuition costs, more and more students go to college every year. A bachelor\u27s degree is now required for entry into a growing number of professions. And some parents begin planning for the expense of sending their kids to college when they\u27re born. Almost everyone strives to go, but almost no one asks the fundamental question posed byAcademically Adrift: are undergraduates really learning anything once they get there? For a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa\u27s answer to that question is a definitive no. Their extensive research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and, for the first time, the state-of-the-art Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year. According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, forty-five percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills - including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing - during their first two years of college. As troubling as their findings are, Arum and Roksa argue that for many faculty and administrators they will come as no surprise - instead, they are the expected result of a student body distracted by socializing or working and an institutional culture that puts undergraduate learning close to the bottom of the priority list. Academically Adrift holds sobering lessons for students, faculty, administrators, policy makers, and parents - all of whom are implicated in promoting or at least ignoring contemporary campus culture. Higher education faces crises on a number of fronts, but Arum and Roksa\u27s report that colleges are failing at their most basic mission will demand the attention of us all

Aspiring adults adrift : tentative transitions of college graduates

Index.Bibliographie : pages [229]-239.College and emerging adults -- Social and academic learning in college -- Making it in the labor market -- Parents, partners, and optimism about the future -- A way forward