Graduate student recruitment has received relatively little attention in the literature. Most of the research has been quantitative and narrowly focused on factors related to student choice. While graduate student enrollment has remained essentially stable for over ten years, demographic shifts and anticipated needs for doctoral prepared faculty and scientists give cause for concern. The goals of this research were to understand how four departments at a large research university approach graduate student recruitment and what influences how departments recruit students. In addition, the study sought to understand how students experience the recruitment process and how that experience may differ by ethnic group, by gender, and by department. One hundred faculty, administrators, and graduate students were interviewed and a wide variety of documents were analyzed. Findings indicate graduate recruitment has been left to the departments, in contrast to undergraduate recruitment where coercive mechanisms have been applied centrally, through access and equal opportunity initiatives. Departmental goals related to recruitment focus primarily on getting the best students, while central administration goals are centered on increasing diversity among students and enhancing the quality of research. The numbers and characteristics of the customers, suppliers, and competitors have a significant impact on departmental recruitment. Experiences of students differed widely by department and by level of study. Generally students did not feel recruited. Masters students had different experiences than did doctoral students, and women had different experiences than male graduate students. The practical implications are: (1) Because graduate student recruitment is a student-initiated process, communication about graduate school must improve; (2) Departments must take better care of students, both undergraduate and graduate, so that students will want to continue their education at the graduate level; (3) Faculty involvement in recruitment is important; (4) Recruitment can be enhanced by strengthening connections among units on campus; (5) Departments lack expertise in recruitment; (6) Departmental efforts to increase ethnic minority enrollment need to be improved; (7) External sources of potential graduate students need to be explored; (8) Ways to decrease the financial obstacles must be developed and maintained; and (9) Consideration should be given to increasing graduate student enrollment in particular disciplines.

The character of the professional socialization experience is a subject of debate in the literature; one of the primary issues being the relative contributions of trainees to the nature of their socializing experience. As crucial as the clinical education experience is to the educational and professional development of medical students, it has received relatively little attention in the literature on professional socialization of physicians. The goals of this research were to understand, from the students' perspective, the character of the first clinical learning experience in the medical school career of a group of medical students and, given the character of that context, the role of student negotiations in their own education and professional socialization. This study employed a symbolic interactionist framework and the data collection methods of participant observation and unstructured interview. The data collection was conducted over a six-week period during which time the researcher experienced along with a group of six medical students their first clinical learning experience. These students perceived the clinical learning environment to be challenging, complex and frequently too busy to easily accommodate their learning needs. They recognized the enormity of their learning task and of their own incompetence. These were the basic perceptions that prompted the students to negotiate their clinical learning experience. Student negotiations took three basic forms: the creation of new learning opportunities, the manipulation of existing learning resources, and interpretation of events and behaviors. Students' negotiations were constrained by the structure of the education program and the students' own assertiveness. The study's findings indicate that the students were active negotiators of the content and the conduct of their own professional education and professional socialization. Even in the face of overwhelming demands on their intellectual and emotional resources, the students expressed their individual and collective intent for their educational experience. The study findings were similar to those of earlier studies of professional socialization, although new behaviors and behaviors inconsistent with those found in previous research were uncovered. Contributions to the literature on professional socialization and to an understanding of this phenomenon were made through the explanation of these inconsistencies.

Diagnostic medical imaging has typically been a feminized profession for decades, however, since the early 1990's, has increasingly attracted more men into the field, where now, the gender make up for diagnostic imaging is near parity. Medical imaging is a dynamic field comprised of ever evolving technology and sub-imaging fields, referred to as imaging modalities, including computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, mammography, cardiovascular imaging, and nuclear medicine, to name a few. Diagnostic imaging is now described as where the new "hot" jobs are located, and entrance into the field has continued to grow by more than 11 percent each year. This study is designed, through the interviewing of 39 men and women from two radiography programs located geographically 50 miles from one another, to explore the interest of men entering a feminized field characterized as a "high touch" profession, with occupational characteristics that consist of a broad mix of patient care/technology skills. While there is focus on men entering imaging, exploration of the interests of women entering this highly technical and physically challenging profession is a large part of this study, as radiography is feminized yet does not hold necessarily the occupational characteristics consistent with that of feminized fields. Additionally, this study is designed to determine what male and female perspectives are of the profession, as medical imaging has been characterized as consisting of "subordinates" who work under nurses, doctors and radiologists, occupational characteristics that do not typically attract men.

New student affairs professionals encounter a myriad of socialization challenges as they undergo both graduate and professional socialization and organizational socialization. More often than not, these environments are socializing new student affairs professionals in ways that are incongruent and perhaps even oppositional. Layered on top of these general socialization tensions is the emergence and encroachment of academic capitalism into student affairs professional environments. For the purpose of this dissertation, the term Market Effect with be utilized in place of academic capitalism to depict how academic capitalism has manifested itself in the student affairs profession. This case study of four college student personnel programs seeks to understand how new student affairs professionals make sense of and resolve socialization tensions in professional environments and the extent to which these socialization tensions are created by the marketization of the student affairs profession. The literatures drawn upon in this study include, the sociology of professions and professionalization, professional socialization and education, student affairs history and professional ideology, and academic capitalism and the marketization of student affairs. Implications and recommendations are made in the final chapter.

This study examines the psychological, social and environmental predictors of sexually aggressive and assaultive behaviors reported by a sample of 466 males at one institution. Emphasis was placed on determining the impact of Greek affiliation and place of residence on self-reported aggressive and assaultive behaviors. A questionnaire was administered which incorporated demographic and background characteristics, environmental characteristics and attitudes towards women and relationships. Analysis of variance was used to determine statistically significant differences among five residential groupings on selected variables. A series of interlocking multiple regression analyses was then performed to determine the predictive influence of factors explored in this study. Results indicate that "peer harassment," including verbal aggression and unwanted touching, was reported by the total sample with great frequency. More severe behaviors were reported with less frequency, however, slightly more than 5% of the men in the total sample reported committing at least one act which met the legal criteria for sexual assault in the academic year preceding the study. Although statistically significant differences among residential groups emerged, attitudes and living environment characteristics found predictive of sexually aggressive and assaultive behaviors were found in all living environments. "Worst" behavior reported was predicted best by rape myth acceptance followed by environmental and background characteristics including the number of sexual partners one had, sexual speculation about women, alcohol consumption and perceived level of impact one had on their environment. Institutions are encouraged to examine the level of sexual violence against women on campuses and marshal the efforts of student personnel administrators as well as faculty in an effort to reduce the prevalence of such behavior.

Considerable research, policy, and programmatic efforts have been dedicated to addressing the participation of particular populations in STEM for decades. Each of these efforts claims equity- related goals; yet, they heavily frame the problem, through pervasive STEM pipeline model discourse, in terms of national needs, workforce supply, and competitiveness. This particular framing of the problem may, indeed, be counter to equity goals, especially when paired with policy that largely relies on statistical significance and broad aggregation of data over exploring the identities and experiences of the populations targeted for equitable outcomes in that policy. In this study, I used the mixed-methods approach of critical discourse and critical quantitative analyses to understand how the pipeline model ideology has become embedded within academic discourse, research, and data surrounding STEM education and work and to provide alternatives for quantitative analysis. Using critical theory as a lens, I first conducted a critical discourse analysis of contemporary STEM workforce studies with a particular eye to pipeline ideology. Next, I used that analysis to inform logistic regression analyses of the 2006 SESTAT data. This quantitative analysis compared and contrasted different ways of thinking about identity and retention. Overall, the findings of this study show that many subjective choices are made in the construction of the large-scale datasets used to inform much national science and engineering policy and that these choices greatly influence likelihood of retention outcomes.

This study analyzes the dominant governance and decision making characteristics in community colleges by tracing the implementation of state mandated program review through two Florida community colleges. An alternative hypothesis is presented which challenges the predominate assumption in the community college literature which portrays these institutions as bureaucratic organizations. Through the application of a hybrid framework which combines three dominant organizational models--bureaucratic, political, and organized anarchy--with three parallel views of policy implementation--programmed, evolutionary, and adaptive--the study suggests that in governance and decision making as well as policy implementation, these colleges exhibit behavior more varied and complex than can be captured by any one model. A case study method was utilized to address the assumptions of the study. Field work included extensive interviews at both institutions and at the Division of Community Colleges. Content analysis was completed on the data gathered on site and analyzed across the several dimensions of the framework. In addition to suggesting alternative governance and decision making models, the study also challenges the closed systems perception of community colleges. Issues of coordination and control are explored, particularly in relation to the environmental vulnerability of two-year colleges. The study concludes that community college governance and decision making is too complex to be explained by a single model. Political and anarchic behavior are generally more prevalent than bureaucratic behavior. The president at each institution exercised authority in a manner which encouraged political and anarchic behavior. This led ultimately to increased presidential discretion and greater executive or managerial authority. These institutions responded to the state policy initiative by projecting the appropriate image of conformity to the state while simultaneously buffering the institution from any substantive policy influence. Implications for further research include the need to more thoroughly analyze the open systems nature of two-year colleges, with particular emphasis on the complex environment in which they operate. Policy implementation in community colleges should be reconsidered in light of the adaptive and evolutionary implementation behavior of these local institutions.

Description of students as at-risk became a trend in educational policy and programming in the late 1980s. The term at risk was originally part of the specialized discourse of medicine and psychology, and related subfields of education such as special education and educational psychology. Due to the influence of national reform reports, the term at risk became more common in the discourse of policymakers and practitioners. It was used as a descriptor of students, often low-income and/or minority students, likely to fail or drop out of school. This study employed methods from sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and policy analysis to trace the uses and meanings of at risk through national reports, state education policies in Arizona, and district policies in a medium-sized Arizona school district with both rural and suburban schools. Analysis of reports and recorded interviews with state policymakers, district administrators, principals, and teachers identified differences in the meanings of at risk at different levels of the educational system. Groups at each level had particular interests in students, as reflected in their definitions of the problems of at-risk students and their policy recommendations. The most common consequences for students of being labelled at-risk were to be removed from the mainstream for special treatment, despite arguments of some researchers and theorists that educators need to rethink such approaches.

This study tests hypotheses posed in a 1983 article regarding the Sloan School of Management and the Harvard Business School (HBS). In this article, Van Maanen (1983) states that student-faculty and student-student relations in the two MBA programs differ due to their contrasting institutional and curricular characteristics. Subsequently, the Sloan School of Management adopted some of the same characteristics found at HBS. By adopting a cohort system, eliminating the master's thesis as a degree requirement, increasing its program size, and placing greater emphases on student in-class participation and faculty teaching quality relative to research production, the Sloan School has begun to resemble HBS structurally. Through interviews with MBA students, faculty members, and administrators as well as observations of classes and analysis of documents including course syllabi, this study attempts to determine whether the Sloan culture resembles that found in the literature on HBS. The results show that Sloan's culture looks more similar to that at HBS in some ways. Most importantly, the implementation of the cohort system has increased the sense of cohesiveness among students. In this manner, the Sloan culture has begun to resemble that at HBS. The more dramatic effects on student-faculty and student-student relations that are attributed to the HBS cohort, however, have not begun to appear at Sloan. Nor have the increased emphases on student in-class participation and faculty teaching quality had the same effects at Sloan as they have at HBS.

Counselors are currently being scrutinized as to their place in a community college setting. Administrative units are questioning whether counselors are necessary, and whether they should maintain their past role. But before changes are made, the full scope of the role needs to be examined. Previous studies have concentrated on role definition, looking primarily at which tasks counselors perform and their job satisfaction. I first examine the counselor's role using a role definition format to provide a baseline of data to compare with other studies. Then I considered three other elements--intangible services, professionalization, and the bureaucratic setting--that I proposed were contributing to the uncertain position of counselors in community colleges. This is a qualitative case study of community college counselors. Personal interviews with counselors were utilized as the primary source of data. The case study institution is a large, urban, multi-campus community college. Results indicate that counselors are satisfied with their generalist role of providing primarily career and academic counseling, providing a very small percentage of personal counseling and providing a variety of other services. This is unlike the literature which suggests that counselors are dissatisfied with the generalist role and prefer a more specialized personal counseling role. The counselors in this study were frustrated by their perceived role by other groups. They felt misunderstood and unappreciated. Consequently, they searched for ways to make their services more visible and understandable. They also relied heavily on their professional status to validate their role. But rather than emphasizing their traditional professional counseling characteristics like the use of a theoretical body of knowledge or specialized training and certification, they underscored their similarity to the instructional faculty who command the highest professional status in community colleges. The counselor's role was also highly effected by bureaucratization. The very nature of bureaucracies induces human interaction that is brief and efficient, but not necessarily meaningful. Improving human interaction is where counselors need to focus their efforts, rather than dwelling on professional status. And, administrators must also consider human interaction rather than just dividing tasks and measuring the number of students served.