During the last decade the term "economic development" has been widely used in community college policy statements and literature, but the meaning of the term has lacked clarity and consistency in interpretation. Additionally, there is little empirical information regarding the design of community college economic development programs. The purpose of this study was twofold. First, to determine community college faculty and administrator perceptions of the term "economic development". Second, to analyze the actors, processes, organizational structures, role of faculty and external forces affecting economic development programs at community colleges. A political/pluralistic framework and qualitative research methods were selected to capture the dynamics of a complex, multi-college community college district. The study found that college constituents hold varying interpretations of the term "economic development". Full-time faculty define economic developments in terms of employable skills and job training for students. Administrators, almost without exception, perceive economic development as serving the needs of business, primarily large, corporate businesses. The organizational structure for economic development programs includes a centralized district economic development department and some college-level business and industry institutes. These structures are primarily "stand alone" entities, largely administratively run, operating parallel to but separate from the traditional, main educational functions of the college. The purpose of the district economic development department is to help recruit large, corporate businesses and to hire and train a work force for relocating or expanding companies. The economic development role of the community colleges is primarily industrial training. Few full-time faculty participate in the development and implementation of economic development courses or programs which are primarily designed and taught by independent contractors, many times employees of the company receiving the training. The study raises the question of whether community college economic development programs are driven by state or local interests because of the emphasis on serving primarily large, corporate companies in lieu of small to middle size local companies. Also, in light of diminishing state and local resources and additional demands placed on community colleges, policymakers must reevaluate their role in economic development and existing methods of funding such programs.

This study utilizes descriptive statistics and regression analysis to evaluate trends in and relationships between tuition price, institutional aid, enrollment, and tuition revenue and their determination of the net revenue generated by colleges and universities. In doing so, it defines how much institutions generate in net revenue utilizing a new metric, net revenue generation rate (NRGR). This allows a new way of thinking about the relationship between the listed tuition price, the investment in aid, and the resultant gain or loss incurred by institutions due to pricing and aiding strategies. Additionally, it explores NRGR in the context of various tuition prices and institutional types over an extended period of time, as no other previous study has done. Publics institutions with higher tuition prices generate higher NRGR's. The opposite is found for private institutions. However as price increases, NRGR decreases. Larger enrollments relate to higher NRGR's, however increases in enrollment negatively influence NRGR for public institutions and positively influence private instituion's NRGR. Baccalaureate, Doctoral, and institutions of higher selectivity produce the largest net revenue per student, yet do so at the lowest NRGR's.This study also introduces the first assessment of marginal NRGR as a means of directly measuring the impact of increasing tuition price on aid and how much institutions make from an increase in tuition. As institutions increase tuition price, institutional aid increases, decreasing the amount of incremental revenue generated from the change in tuition price. This behavior is most clear for private institutions and varies by institutional type.This study also introduces a number of theoretical explanations for pricing and aiding behaviors and their potential effects on the net revenue they generate. This includes a commitment to meeting student financial need as well as attempts to maximize quality and net revenue.Finally, this study provides the first comprehensive use of IPEDS data to address these questions. In doing so, it provides significant gains in the methodology and application of this data set for use in answering questions about tuition price, institutional aid, and net revenue generation across a broad array of institutional types over extended periods of time.

Admission to medical school is key to addressing medically underserved communities because over 90% of medical students graduate and become physicians. Yet, members of populations most likely to serve medically underserved communities as physicians remain chronically underrepresented in medical education despite initiatives aimed at increasing their representation among medical students. Meanwhile, traditional determinants of medical school admission fail to fully predict success in medical school, but have a disparate impact on applicants from underrepresented populations. Other determinants are underexplored, especially undergraduate institutional prestige. This study used a quantitative case study approach to examine the relationship between undergraduate institutional prestige, admission to medical school, and potential to serve medically underserved communities via specialty. Using a synthesis of the frameworks of symbolic capital, the iron triangle, and manifest and latent functions as a lens, this study analyzes (1) the relative impact of undergraduate institutional prestige on predicting admission to medical school holding constant the effect of traditional determinants of admission to medical school (i.e., MCAT, GPA), (2) how undergraduate institutional prestige varies by admissions stage, and (3) the relationship between undergraduate institutional prestige and specialty. Overall, findings show that undergraduate institutional prestige is important throughout the medical school admissions process; yet, undergraduate institutional prestige is not related to specialty. Nonetheless, findings imply preferences for applicants from more prestige undergraduate institutions may be contradictory to fulfilling organizational missions concerned with addressing healthcare disparities.

This study focused on the testimonios [life narratives] of 33 Mexican American Ph.D.s who successfully navigated educational systems and obtained their doctorates in a variety of disciplines at 15 universities across the United States. The theoretical and methodological frameworks employed were critical race theory (CRT), Latina/o critical race theory (LatCrit), and narrative analysis in order to examine power relations, multiple forms of oppression, and the intersections of race, social class, and gender within educational contexts. CRT and LatCrit frameworks were expanded by attending to the experiences of middle class participants and participants who identified as second- or third-generation college students, which challenge traditional paradigms that essentialize Mexican American communities. This study uncovered and contextualized the ways that Mexican American Ph.D.s resisted and reproduced power relations, racism, sexism, and classism through master narratives constructed by the dominant culture to justify low rates of Mexican American educational attainment. The findings suggested that as the dominant culture develops master narratives, Mexican American communities reproduce these stories as well. Mexican American communities also crafted counter-narratives that resisted the master narratives. The dominant culture master narratives were: Mexican American families do not value education; Mexican American women are not allowed to get an education; The dominant culture and Mexican American communities reproduce masculinist ideology; If Mexican Americans would work hard enough and persevere, they can succeed in education; The U.S. is a colorblind, gender-blind, and class-blind society; and Mexican Americans are only in college/graduate school because they are minorities. In addition, Mexican American communities constructed two master narratives in an effort to advocate for educational equity and increase research in Mexican American communities: Mexican Americans must struggle through educational systems and Mexican American Ph.D.s should research Mexican American issues. This study provided a venue for narratives on Mexican American educational attainment that reflected struggle and survival, privilege and merit, as well as overcoming obstacles and not finding any barriers along the way. These narratives have the power to reshape, reframe, and transform discourses of deficiency to those of empowerment and resistance in K-12 education, postsecondary education, and graduate school.

This dissertation explores the daily lives of student services personnel at for-profit and community colleges by inquiring into how they frame the students they work with and whose interests they articulate themselves as serving. Student services personnel are tasked with serving students but must do so within the context and structure in which they work. This research determines whether there are differences between for-profit and community colleges in how student services personnel frame students and whose interests they see themselves serving. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 38 student services personnel at 2 for-profit colleges and 2 community colleges. Drawing on Stanton-Salazar’s (2011) definition of institutional agent and Lipsky’s (2010) work on street-level bureaucrats, this research extends the term institutional agent by expanding the definition to include five agent typologies: student agent, corporate agent, employer agent, disciplinary agent, and positional agent. This dissertation concludes that there are differences in the frequency with which agent typologies in each college sector occur and that the structure of a college and a student services personnel’s role within the college have meaning for how personnel frame students and whose interests they articulate serving. In addition, student services personnel act as policy-makers in their interactions with students by determining which students are deserving of their time and effort. At community college one might expect bureaucratic hurdles and time constraints to interfere with how institutional agents serve students, but I also find that institutional agents frame students in a way that allows them to determine when to help students navigate policy “gray area” and when to abide by policy guidelines. Despite the negative attention for problematic practices at for-profit colleges, one might expect the structure of for-profit colleges to closely align with an institutional agent’s position in serving students. I find that institutional agents at for-profit colleges often do work with the structure of their college to serve students, but also often shift responsibility for students not succeeding to variables outside of the institution’s control.

Over the past ten years institutions of higher education throughout the country have begun to expand their educational offerings to the online environment. While the benefits of online education have been touted by administrators and institutions across the country, the actual impact on students' education is unclear (Distance learning student services: An interview with CTDLC executive director Ed Klonoski.2004; Planning reaps variety of benefits for distance programs.2006; Restauri, 2004; Yang & Cornelius, 2004). Many authors including Cox (2005) and Vail (2006) have found that in their rush to take advantage of the online market, many schools have failed to adequately prepare and develop both the educational and student services foundation needed for a successful online education program. This dissertation seeks to provide insight into the development of the online educational student services environment within the community college setting. Based on the work of Orlikowski and Gash (1994), an examination of the technological frames of institutional stakeholders was performed. Through this analysis a clearer picture of the online services development process was achieved. Furthermore, the theory of technological frames was examined to proved a framework from which organizations may examine their own institutional structures Using a multifaceted qualitative case study approach, this dissertation explored both the level of satisfaction students are receiving from the online student services environment and the technological frames of stakeholders that contributed to the current state of service. The findings of this research provided insight into current practices as well as contributed to the literature through the expansion of the theory of technological frames.

This paper explores the relationship between for-profit higher education institutions and accreditation. Two sets of research questions are examined. The first set of research questions looks at the characteristics of for-profits regionally accredited versus nationally accredited. The second set of research questions looks at the characteristics of for-profits that keep accreditation versus those who lose accreditation. Analysis is conducted using panel longitudinal data that has been merged together from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), the Office of Federal Student Aid, and the Postsecondary Education Participation System (PEPS). Both descriptive statistics and logistic regressions are used to explore the hypotheses in this paper. The findings contribute to the field’s understanding of for-profits and accreditation. This paper found in general for-profits are not losing accreditation. Regionally accreditors in particular are not revoking accreditation. Larger for-profits are more likely to be regionally accredited. Revenue, enrollment, and number of campuses, in particular seem to keep institutions from losing accreditation. Policy continues to be created (or reversed) to address concerns over for-profits but it has done so without enough statistical analysis to backup those decisions. The relationship between for-profits and accreditation is mutually beneficial and therefore needs to be further researched and addressed.

Entrepreneurship within higher education is most often examined as set of market and market-like behaviors within colleges and universities. The field of entrepreneurship studies has been largely neglected by higher education scholars. This qualitative study focuses on entrepreneurship as an academic discipline emerging within the academic capitalist/learning regime. Specific attention is paid to expanding student markets, capitalist behaviors among entrepreneurship students, and the emerging multidisciplinary faculty culture associated with the expanding academic discipline of entrepreneurial studies.I used semi-structured individual interviews, document analysis, and self-administered student questionnaires as the methods for collecting data essential to better understanding the evolution of entrepreneurship education within the context of academic capitalism. The research was conducted at two public research universities: the University of Iowa and the University of Texas at El Paso. From this study, I show the increasing trend of undergraduate students acting as state-subsidized capitalists, the fluid and recursive nature of the capitalist academy, and the multidimensional traits of the faculty cultures that are emerging within the academic capitalist knowledge/learning regime.

Enhancing the cultural diversity of faculty has emerged as a prominent issue in the 1990's. While Black, Hispanic, and American Indians have made incremental gains in terms of their representation in majority institutions, they remain clustered in the lower ranks of the faculty and generally take longer to achieve tenure. Efforts to increase the representation of minority faculty have focused on intensified recruitment, with less attention paid to further career development once a minority individual has achieved faculty status. The research presented herein explores the evaluation, promotion and tenure process of a Research I university to determine the structural and ideological barriers to minority faculty advancement. The research focuses on concepts of merit, excellence, and quality that form the cornerstones to evaluation standards, and the values, attitudes and behavioral expectations that underlie those standards. Using critical theory as the conceptual framework that drives the inquiry, the findings indicate that the pervasive ideology of merit, being universalistic in nature, does not easily accommodate diversity and trivializes racial, class, and gender issues while perpetuating a system of structured inequality.

The model for observation is a "package" of salient dimensions of an ideal computer-supported language learning environment: (1) opportunities for learners to interact and to negotiate meaning; (2) an authentic audience; (3) authentic tasks; (4) opportunities for exposure to and production of rich and varied language; (5) opportunities for learners to formulate ideas and thoughts; (6) learner intentional cognition; (7) an ideal-anxiety atmosphere, and (8) learner control. Learner perceptions of these factors are captured via questionnaires before and at the end of two computer-supported interventions. Responses answer the following questions: How do adult community college ESL learners perceive their classroom environments? When computer technology is added to support a drill-and-practice environment or to create a cooperative environment, how do the learners perceive these new environments? To what extent and how do the patterns of perceptions and the relationships between variables change from the initial to the intervention environment? Multi-dimensional scaling constructs maps of learners' perceptions in the pretest and posttest conditions; this systemic analysis shows changes in relationships between the factors and provides an overall picture of these changes. Repeated-measures multivariate analyses of variance are used to determine significant differences both between and within the participant groups for each factor; this analytic data complements that of the MDS maps. Results indicated that learners perceive their learning environments in unexpected ways and that the technology has an impact on these perceptions in that it allows the classroom to be "individualized" in ways not possible without it. Also discussed are implications for task construction and grouping and the importance of learner perceptions to an understanding of the language learning environment.