The Self-Rated Writing Skills of Business Majors: Graduating Perceptions and Collegiate Improvement

We analyze the self-rated writing skills of graduating business majors and perceptions on how much these skills changed during college. Subjective skill measures may be good proxies of objective skills, and affect outcomes such as career goals, job applications, and graduate school enrollment. The sample includes 436,370 students from 619 different institutions. On average and all else equal, business majors are estimated to be 17.6% less likely to report high writing skills at graduation when compared with other students and 11.5% less likely to report high gains in these skills during college. Average differences across disciplines are often large.

The Impact of No-Loan Program Participation on the Likelihood of Graduate School Enrollment Among Low-Income, First-Generation Students

Previous research shows that low-income and first-generation college students are less likely to obtain the benefits associated with attending graduate school. No-loan programs, which typically administer financial aid through institutional grants, are designed to improve access and success among students from low-income backgrounds, but we know very little about the influence of noloan programs after students enroll and eventually graduate from college. This study examines the impact of no-loan program participation on graduate school enrollment by leveraging a novel institutional dataset and employing regression discontinuity, difference-in-differences, and propensity score weighting approaches. Results indicate that no-loan program participation has a positive and relatively consistent impact on graduate school enrollment among low-income and first-generation students.

Remembering and Revisiting Pedagogies of the Home

Almost two decades after Delgado Bernal’s theorization of pedagogies of the home, this article examines pedagogies of the home of four Chicana/o college-educated families to understand the role of parent engagement not only in the college choice processes but also in college completion and graduate school enrollment. Using Chicana feminisms to inform educational oral histories, four Chicana/o parent-child dyads were interviewed. The findings suggest that among Chicana/o college-educated families the (re)making of home, (re)covering tensions, and (re)claiming and (re)learning of cultural knowledge were the pedagogies of the home that were embraced by two successive generations of college completers. Complexities, contradictions, and nuances among Chicana/o college-educated families add to the theorization of pedagogies of the home.

A Meta-Analysis of Graduate School Enrollment from Students in the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Program

The Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program provides higher education institutions with federal funds to increase the doctoral attainment for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. We conducted a meta-analysis of the impact of the McNair program on graduate program enrollment. After an exhaustive literature search, we found 7 publications containing 13 studies that met the inclusion criteria. From these studies, we found that McNair program students were almost six times as likely to enroll in a graduate program as the comparison group. Nonetheless, there was much unexplained variability in effects across studies.

Underrepresentation by Race–Ethnicity across Stages of U.S. Science and Engineering Education

Blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians/Alaskan Natives are underrepresented in science and engineering fields. A comparison of race–ethnic differences at key transition points was undertaken to better inform education policy. National data on high school graduation, college enrollment, choice of major, college graduation, graduate school enrollment, and doctoral degrees were used to quantify the degree of underrepresentation at each level of education and the rate of transition to the next stage. Disparities are found at every level, and their impact is cumulative. For the most part, differences in graduation rates, rather than differential matriculation rates, make the largest contribution to the underrepresentation. The size, scope, and persistence of the disparities suggest that small-scale, narrowly targeted remediation will be insufficient.