Barbara F. Tobolowsky

Stops, Starts, and Detours: Transfer Students’ College Choice Process

ABSTRACT With the number of transfer students increasing and graduation still an elusive goal, the researchers conducted four focus groups and four individual interviews with transfer students attending universities in the Chicago and Dallas-Fort Worth area to better understand and explore the factors that influenced their college choice decisions at their first and subsequent institutions. The specific research questions were: (a) When, why, and how do transfer students select their postsecondary institutions? (b) How do students who have transferred more than once describe their decision-making process and has it changed from their initial college choice decision? The study found many students did not pursue planned, linear pathways to transfer. Rather, they often made spontaneous decisions affected by a range of personal as well as academic issues. The article includes implications for student affairs professionals and high school counselors to facilitate the college choice process.

Lip Service or Actionable Insights? Linking Student Experiences to Institutional Assessment and Data-Driven Decision Making in Higher Education

ABSTRACT Despite an increasing focus on issues of accountability, assessment, and data-driven decision making (DDDM) within the postsecondary context, assumptions regarding their value remain largely untested. The current study uses empirical data from 114 senior administrators and 8,847 students at 57 institutions in five states to examine the extent to which institutional assessment and data-driven decision making shape the experiences of first-year students. Nearly all these schools regularly collect some form of assessment data, and more than half report using assessment data to inform decision making. However, the institutional adoption of policies related to the collection of assessment data or the application of data-driven decision making appears to have no relationship with student experiences or outcomes in the first year of college. Thus, findings from the current study are consistent with the small, but growing, body of literature questioning the effectiveness of accountability and assessment policies in higher education.

Anti-intellectualism and Faculty: Representations of the Prime-Time Professoriate

Using Rigney’s typology of anti-intellectualism, this chapter explores the portrait of televisual faculty in 12 prime-time series (93 episodes) that aired from 1996 to 2014. Faculty represent anti-elitist, anti-rational, and unreflective instrumental views throughout the selected series. They are depicted as cold and critical of students and colleagues and lacking a moral core. When they actually do conduct research, it has no practical application and is presented as frivolous and unnecessary. Yet tenure protects them from censure or removal regardless of their behavior.

Concluding Thoughts on Media Representations of Higher Education: Anti-intellectualism and Other Themes

This chapter revisits the research questions posed in the first chapter to provide a comprehensive analysis of the media depiction of higher education based on the content of the previous chapters. In general, the representation is consistent across media and time. However, unlike the other media, video games and comic books offer a more positive view of the role of institutions and faculty suggesting that they can work to solve problems. The more common perception is that postsecondary institutions do not support, inspire, or promote students. Further, faculty use tenure to protect their bad behavior while students come to college to party. These anti-intellectual sentiments find expression across media and time. The chapter concludes with potential implications of this disparaging portrait of higher education.

Cultivating Anti-intellectualism in the Fictional University

Fictional media representations have presented numerous depictions of higher education over the years. Though research has noted the value of investigating this depiction—because media plays a critical role in shaping viewers’ perceptions, beliefs, and behaviors—it has not been the focus on much scholarly work to date. This chapter provides the rationale for this analysis of the higher education portrait in novels, television, film, comic books, and video games. It also introduces the concepts of anti-intellectualism and cultivation theory, which guided the book’s authors, while offering a glimpse into the content of the upcoming chapters in the volume.

From Delay to Degree: The Postsecondary Experiences of Six Nontraditional Students

This qualitative study extends the research on postsecondary delay by examining the college experiences of six male nontraditional students from the North Texas area who purposefully postponed college education for 3 years after high school graduation to fulfill religious commitments. Unlike the majority of delayers, the participants successfully attained bachelor degrees within 4 years from their initial college enrollment. Using Bronfenbrenner and Morris’s bioecological model of human development as a conceptual framework, four main themes emerged, which students credited for their college success: (a) reestablishing academic momentum, (b) overcoming financial challenges, (c) receiving institutional support, and (d) relying on personal development from delay activities.

Bridging the Cultural Gap: Relationships Between Programmatic Offerings and First-Generation Student Benchmarks:

Inherent challenges affect first-generation students’ persistence from as early as the first college year. Using cultural capital as a guide, this study is unique in that it investigates the contribution of first-year policies and programs to the success of first-generation students in 57 bachelor’s degree–granting institutions across five states (California, Florida, Iowa, Texas, and Pennsylvania). We identified at least three policies that seem to hold promise toward improving the experience and outcomes for first-year first-generation college students. These policies were (a) residential life or campus support staff who are available and knowledgeable, (b) faculty who attend faculty orientation that includes information about first-year student experiences, and (c) faculty who attend first-year student orientation or attend first-year conferences or workshops. However, policies we might naturally expect to have been useful (e.g., information dissemination to parents, early alert intervention initiatives) showed no statistical significance. The article concludes with implications and recommendations.