This study is a multidisciplinary historical analysis of the national junior-community college mission debate in the twentieth century. It utilizes resource dependency, institutional and social movement theories to explain the organizational behaviors of the community college as these relate to the concept of mission. Historians of the colleges note that the first junior colleges were established without clear missions or a plausible theoretical framework to rationalize their educational activities and social purposes. Growth in concern about the mission and identity of the community college parallels movement expansion.A common conception among community college scholars is that the colleges are non-traditional, non-specialized by design, and mandated to provide a comprehensive curriculum to their communities. Practitioners tend to focus on the ideas of openness, access, and responsiveness to community needs. Historically, there has been little consensus among practitioners, advocates, and academic researchers about the educational outcomes and social significance of the colleges. Practitioners and critics often speak past each other because they employ incommensurate units of analysis and possess conflicting or unexamined assumptions. As a result, these multiple lenses of analysis lead to multiple understandings (and misunderstanding) of the community college mission.This study analyzes how and why the junior college was transformed from a minor extension of secondary education to an expansive, ubiquitous national institution embracing a fungible, even amorphous, comprehensive mission. It contextualizes two questions posed by George Vaughan:Why do even the community college's most articulate and intelligent leaders have difficulty explaining its Proteus-like characteristics? Why is it difficult to explain to the public in simple and understandable terms the twin towers of community college philosophy: open access and comprehensiveness? (1991a, p. 2)Two additional questions guide this research and lead to the investigation's findings:1) How can organization, institutional and social movement theories clarify the mission problem?2) What is the impact of postindustrial change on the contemporary community college mission?This study employs historical methods, grounded theory, and case study methodology to elaborate and explain organizational behavior and to uncover previously ignored characteristics of the national community movement.

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 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.

Powerful norms tend to define the purpose and function of higher education as a means for individual students to improve individual social mobility and to attain occupational status, and oftentimes, we assume this to be the primary intent of any college student (Baum, Ma, & Payea, 2013; Day & Newberger, 2002). For the purpose of this study, the normative framing of college as primarily an individual benefit is scrutinized to understand how this norm engages American Indian students in the college-going process. Indigenous scholars argue that infusing the concept of Native Nation Building into our understandings of higher education challenges such mainstream cultural norms and fills a space between the individual and mainstream society (Brayboy, Fann, Castagno, and Solyom, 2012). This qualitative study proposes the Individual-Independent/Political-Collective Paradox Model to understand how American Indian students navigate and make-meaning of collective values and the role of student tribal status on the college-going process. Through the voices of thirty-seven American Indian college students, the findings demonstrate the critical thinking and navigation of varying realities that American Indian students face when entering higher education institution. I present the three main findings of this study. The first finding presents how the participant's college-going process is not linear in both pathways and meaning making. Through a college-going typology, students reveal how the college-going phases have cyclical aspects, where each phase is built upon each other and influence subsequent meaning- and decision-making. The second finding demonstrates how the college-choice process is instrumental in understanding how students frame the purpose of higher education through collective values that are intricately related to students' reference of tribal enrollment. The third finding shows how collective values and tribal enrollment help inform the meaning of financial aid for students. These meanings reveal that tribal aid is not only relevant to providing access during the college exploration and choice phases, but the aid reinforces students' purpose of higher education and future goals, which both are primarily collective in nature.

For decades, researchers have sought greater understanding of the educational achievement gap between Blacks and Whites in the U.S. Past studies have concentrated heavily on K-12 attainment, and more recently on that of minority paths to higher education as well as obstacles to academic achievement. Often unnoticed are the interactions between social forces and the individual level psycho-social and cultural factors that may place a significant role; the stigmatization and resultant marginalization of Black students by negative stereotypes that classify them as intellectually inferior. This study explores African American and Black African highs school students' perceptions of negative stereotypes placed upon them through the conceptual frameworks of critical race theory (CRT) and the multidimensional model of racial identity (MMRI). Examining differences by immigrant status, this study seeks to uncover the intersection between the socially constructed images assigned to stigmatized groups differently influenced by negative stereotypes of Blacks and the subsequent influence on the students' perceptions and expectations of higher education. The narratives of this study illustrate the complexity of and interplay between external forces, minority youth social identities and pathways to academic attainment. This study finds that African American and Black African youth have multiple social identities that are not always reflective of the most accessible one of race. This study finds that salient social identities, personal or vicarious experiences of discrimination and being negatively stereotyped shape Black youths' individual aspirations and strategies for achievement. The present study calls into question the claim that Black youth process and respond to negative stereotypes of Blacks in a predictable manner and that these students respond to them independently of other social forces such as their families and communities in which they reside.

This study examined the institutional and governmental forces that contributed to the passage of community college baccalaureate (CCB) legislation, and the plans for future implementation of a CCB within differing state contexts. The analysis of governmental and institutional actors was conducted through the lens of institutional theory, state relative autonomy theory, resource dependency theory, and coalition framework theory, in order to determine how those interactions affected policy change at community colleges. The three most significant findings were the universities’ perception of community colleges as competitors, policy entrepreneurship, and the importance of coalition building. First, the scarcity of state funding, students, and other resources prompted the universities to act more as competitors or opponents than partners. In turn, community colleges, responding to the lack of access by the universities, turned to themselves to provide the baccalaureate, which incensed universities because they saw the CCB not only as an infringement on their turf but as a competitive threat. Second, successful states that were able to pass CCB legislation, had policy entrepreneurs who were instrumental in changing the status quo and promoting innovation. Policy entrepreneurs in this study built networks and coalitions of powerful people who could execute their plan and influence policy change. Finally, although the policy entrepreneur was a critical factor in policy change, the true power lay in the base, or the coalitions and networks of people who shared the same beliefs. Without a true collective movement, even with powerful and invested policy entrepreneurs and stakeholders, the legislation could not pass.

This study explored how international offices engage in entrepreneurial internationalization. Thirty Senior International Officers (SIOs) at public U.S. universities were interviewed to understand why and how their offices seek to generate revenue through their international strategies and activities. This study found that SIOs are engaging in entrepreneurialism for the following reasons: funding cuts, expectations of their institutions, and growing student demand for international services. These drivers have resulted in targeted international activities, such as the delivery of U.S. credit to foreign students in their home country (without a branch campus) and the growth of dual degree programs. International offices are also developing strategic partnerships with enrollment management in trying to attract more international students to campus. This study found entrepreneurialism to largely align with the educational priorities of international offices, though a misalignment of incentives and priorities seems to exist within many international offices.

This qualitative case study of parents in a single metropolitan school district explored how Latino/a parents with elementary school aged children conceptualized and framed college. It employed a funds of knowledge framework (Moll et al., 1992; Velez-Ibanez & Greenberg, 1992) to understand college knowledge, families framing of college, and the collective sensemaking of the community. Archival data, interviews, participant observations, and field notes were gathered to explore parents/guardians’ beliefs, opinions, and values and whether and how they are shaped by educational attainment, language, and immigrant generation status. Findings revealed that families adopted a meritocratic belief even when families encountered systemic structures of inequality. Hard work did not necessarily translate into college. Yet, families actively engaged, strategized, prepared, and collectively planned how to make college a possibility. This study is significant as it provides an opportunity to document the process of parent’s college sensemaking, sheds light on Latino/a college choice models and types of institutions, and provides a deeper exploration of college preparation from a funds of knowledge approach. This work contributes to previous research utilizing funds of knowledge in order to further differentiate among levels of knowledge in Latino/a communities, focusing on variations by language preference, generational status, educational attainment.

This qualitative study utilizes data acquired from interviews with 18 community college transfer students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) majors and 7 university staff people who work in direct student services with this student population. This study explores the experiences of transfer students in STEM majors regarding what influenced their college persistence, particularly the relevance of STEM career aspirations. Students report their experiences of social and academic integration after transfer; the phenomenon of transfer shock is also explored and incorporated. Institutional policies such as articulation agreements are considered. Implications for student services practice and future research are presented.

This multi-site case study is really the story of three same-state community colleges (Bridge and Buffer Community College, Grants and Reserves Community College, and Crystal Ball Community College) two years after they suffered a potentially catastrophic 50% reduction in state allocations. This study examined their responses to those reductions and attempted to frame those responses according to existing research on strategic activity and strategic positioning. The theoretical framework used, referenced as a theoretical mesh, consisted of academic capitalism (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004), resource dependence theory (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978), state relative autonomy perspective (Dougherty, 1994), and neo-institutional theory (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). The synthesis of these theories facilitated the analysis of the findings of this study. This study identified three key phenomena: The Quartering of Community Colleges to conceptualize and organize the abundance of external pressures facing community colleges, Mandates to Neutralize to explain the importance of an aggressive and formal approach to neutralizing external pressures, and Embedded Community Colleges whose strategic positions are strengthened through a deliberate, committed approach to fostering close relationships with their local communities.