Student Experience

A number of national studies point to a trend in which highly selective and elite private and public universities are becoming less accessible to lower-income students. At the same time there have been surprisingly few studies of the actual characteristics and academic experiences of low-income students or comparisons of their undergraduate experience with those of more wealthy students. This paper explores the divide between poor and rich students, first comparing a group of selective US institutions and their number and percentage of Pell Grant recipients and then, using...

In a shot heard around the United States, on May 21, 2020, the University of California’s Board of Regents suspended the requirement and use of standardized tests, including the SAT and ACT, for freshman applicants. UC will be test optional for campus selection of freshman in fall 2021 and 2022, and “beginning with fall 2023 applicants and ending with fall 2024 applicants, campuses will not consider test scores for admissions selection at all, and will practice test-blind admissions selection.”

The Regents, along with some 1,200 other universities and colleges, had previously...

All universities and colleges in the United States were deeply and immediately affected by the sudden appearance of Covid-19. Two-year public community colleges suffered the same fate as their university neighbors: the immediate needs were to close up operations, shift instruction to online and distance modalities and keep students engaged and focused when all around them collapsed. But the community colleges suffered under constraints not shared by many of their university neighbors: limited discretionary, little or no funding from endowments to fall back on and students whose limited...

Research universities enable students to have a unique learning environment and other experiences. This article aims to analyze student engagement in one research university in Brazil, the effects of student socioeconomic and academic characteristics and their associations with university structures (curriculum), and student trajectories. The data comes from the Student Experience in the Research University, an international survey administered in 2012 at the University of Campinas and longitudinal academic registers. The study used both Principal Component Analysis and also Multiple...