After Admission: From College Access to College Success

NOTES

NOTES CHAPTER 3 1. Dropout is defined as those students who had not attained a degree and were no longer enrolled toward a degree after five years. 2. Analyzing degree completion leads to the same conclusion. In terms of degree completion, cooling out improves degree completion for both groups, and warming up improves completion for those beginning with associate’s degree plans but hurts degree completion of those beginning with certificate degree plans. Of course, degree completion in five years may not be enough time for those planning bachelor’s degrees, however for those warming from certificate to associate, five years may be considered a suitable time frame. 3. This study does find that warming up was less prevalent at Southside than at the other two colleges. More of the students there decided to follow their original one- and two-year degree plans rather than opting to pursue transfer. We describe how, like faculty at Northwest and Central, faculty at Southside also resist cooling out in favor of warming up, despite institutional pressures favoring occupational programs. CHAPTER 4 1. The number of remedial course areas is based on students’ reports of course titles that they had taken, which is probably a better indicator than their own count of number of remedial course areas, because students don’t always realize that a course is remedial. CHAPTER 8 1. In semistructured interviews, all respondents were asked a core set of questions about their work and their interactions with representatives from their local labor markets. Faculty were asked about their actions, motivations, and the institutional and organizational practices that might enhance or inhibit 245 labor-market linking activity. Interviews were taped and transcribed. Analysis of transcripts began with deductive coding of responses to specific questions about labor-market linkage activities (including the instructors’ own activities, institutional linking activities, and their perceptions of students’ typical ways of finding jobs). Analysis also included open coding of broad employment-related themes, such as labor market influences on the curriculum , demand for employees in a given area, and so on. Later, the data was coded more specifically for those themes that had emerged as important across cases (for example, institutional mandates and individual’s reasons for creating and maintaining employer links). CHAPTER 10 1. The author does not imply, judge, or consider the superiority or inferiority of differing cultural styles or preferences, or suggest that certain cultural behaviors should replace others. 2. Career services offices at the community colleges did not offer direct job placement services, but rather career exploration and the tools for students to do their own job searches. For a fuller description of these differences, see chapter 7. 3. Many of the examples presented come from interviews with program chairs. However, all these chairs are instructors who teach several classes every term. In some departments, they might teach as many as a third of the courses in a given program. They are, furthermore, highly visible and influential in that they play a central role in hiring decisions, evaluations of adjunct instructors, and the supervision and approval of the curriculum content. 246 Notes ...