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While postsecondary enrollment for Latinx students has increased over time, they still encounter significant challenges and barriers that affect their success and bachelor's degree attainment. Understanding these challenges and identifying the resources and support systems that can support Latinx students is crucial for fostering successful Latinx college transitions into and through postsecondary education. My dissertation, comprised of three papers, delves into various dimensions of Latinx college transitions. The first paper explores the cultivation of transfer receptivity for undocumented Latinx community college transfer students, aiming to support their post-transfer experiences at 4-year institutions. The second paper highlights the critical role of parents in supporting Latinx students' college aspirations and decisions, particularly in the context of the challenges posed by COVID-19. Lastly, the third paper investigates the impact of geography on Latinx community college transfer opportunities, mapping out the nuanced ways in which location may influence these transitions.The first paper employs the Transfer Receptive Culture (TRC) framework to identify the support and resources available for undocumented and DACAmented Latinx community college transfer students at their receiving 4-year institutions. This paper identifies four key themes: students received insufficient financial support, there was a need for intentional academic transition support for undocumented students, the significance of undocumented student centers, and the need for culturally competent mental health services. These findings underscore the importance of adapting the TRC framework to include the unique needs of undocumented and DACAmented community college transfer students. Furthermore, it calls on institutions to implement a transfer receptive culture equitably—one that acknowledges and responds to the diverse intersectional identities of undocumented Latinx community college transfer students. The second paper utilizes the Community Cultural Wealth framework to illustrate how Latinx parents drew on various forms of capital, such as aspirational, familial, and navigational capital, to support their children’s college application, choice, and transition during the pandemic. Latinx parents played a critical role in their children’s college decisions by maintaining high college aspirations for their children amidst COVID-19 concerns, entrusting their children with their college choice decisions despite sometimes conflicting with their own, and supporting their children in their college transition through consejos and encouragement. This study emphasizes the importance of cultivating genuine and culturally and linguistically relevant partnerships between institutions and Latinx parents to better support outreach, recruitment, and success of Latinx students. The third paper uses a Critical Race Spatial Analysis and geospatial methods approach to examine and visualize spatial transfer inequities by examining how structural factors (i.e., bachelor’s degree attainment rates, unemployment and poverty rates, and proximity to a 4-year institution) may impact transfer outcomes for Latinx students across city, suburban, and rural locales in California. Findings indicate differences in Latinx transfer outcomes across geography, with higher transfer outcomes observed in bay/coastal areas and areas closer to 4-year public colleges. Most rural community colleges across the state were located farther from 4-year public colleges, emphasizing the challenges that rural Latinx students may face when considering transfer opportunities. Findings also highlight the spatial variability in transfer outcomes in California’s San Joaquin Valley, a region that has historically experienced disinvestment, exclusion, and segregation that has impacted access to educational opportunities in these communities. This study provides insights into how rural contexts and geography may influence transfer outcomes for Latinx community college students, underscoring the importance of policies and practices that address spatial inequities that impact transfer opportunities for Latinx students. Collectively, these three papers contribute insights to the ongoing discourse on higher education access and equity for Latinx students. Findings from this dissertation can inform programs, practices, and policies that aim to support Latinx students’ postsecondary success. These findings underscore the importance of adopting intersectional approaches that seek to transform systems that recognize the unique needs and experiences of Latinx students and their families.

Accredited schools of public health are required to prepare graduate students to competently discuss how racism undermines health equity. A systematic assessment of academic public health norms is needed to clarify how graduate education structures the profession of public health to address racial health inequities. Three aims guided my investigation of common practices of knowledge transmission and production in schools of public health: (1) to determine what is taught to students regarding racial health equity; (2) to classify students’ use of race and theory; and (3) to categorize and contextualize students’ discussions of racism. In this sequential explanatory mixed methods study of existing documents, I examined accreditation self-study reports (N=34) and course syllabi (N=67) from schools of public health (Aim 1) and public health theses and dissertations published between 2018-2022 in the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database (N=13,797 abstracts for Aim 2; N=25 full-text dissertations for Aim 3). I conducted computational text analysis to estimate keyword distributions, manual content analysis to trace racial health equity concepts, and critical race discourse analysis to interpret patterns.Paper 1 revealed unequal exposure to race-related content. Fewer than half of the course syllabi listed learning objectives with racial health equity concepts. Two-thirds of schools of public health assigned journal articles with ‘race’ or ‘racism’. In Paper 2, 36% of abstracts from students’ dissertations and theses contained racial group and explicit theory terms; 62% omitted ‘race.’ The relative distribution of theories indicated students’ focus on proximal exposures rather than structural determinants. In Paper 3, eight percent of abstracts (N=403) contained social inequality theory and racial group terms. I identified three racism narratives within the full-text sample of dissertations: exposure to racism (N=9); potential exposure to racial inequity (N=3); and another exposure among people (N=13). Student-authors’ reflexivity and race conscious campus climates appear to promote public health research on racism. Dissertation findings can inform teaching, research, and practice approaches to racial health inequities. Exposing how everyday practices uphold white supremacist hegemony in schools of public health can accelerate the public health profession toward health equity.

In recent decades, international student mobility (ISM) in the context of American higher education institutions (HEIs) has become increasingly affected by a power-imbued paradigm of racialization. As suggested by a growing number of studies, U.S.-bound international students, especially those from non-Western backgrounds, are subjected to institutionalized racist and xenophobic sentiments, which lead to alarming levels of discrimination against the students (Bardhan & Zhang, 2017; DiAngelo, 2006; Lee & Rice, 2007; Yao, 2018; Yao & Mwangi, 2022). However, in spite of a shared understanding of the adversities confronting the students, there is a dearth of empirical inquiries into the political and ideological underpinnings of the racialization of ISM, let alone the ways in which the students respond to the racialized paradigm as they navigate their everyday lives in a transnational and transcultural environment. In this three-paper dissertation project, I aim to contribute to filling the identified research gaps through a multi-layered examination of the interplay between the cycle of racialization and a specific body of the international student population in the U.S., i.e., undergraduate Chinese international students. Based on the analysis of data collected from three main sources, i.e., the U.S. news media, survey questionnaires, and a 26-month period of ethnographic fieldwork, the findings of my dissertation illustrate that the cycle of racialization targeted at the Chinese students has its roots in a dominant narrative of the West (us)/non-West (them) divide. This dominant narrative, which mirrors the legacies of colonialism, gives rise not only to the essentialized conceptualization of the cultural attributes and national origin of the students, but also to the marginalization of the students as inferior and unassimilable others. Moreover, the findings demonstrate that the identities of the students are influenced but not determined by the imposed West/non-West divide. Drawing on an assemblage of language and other semiotic practices undergirding their everyday learning and living experiences in both online and offline spaces, the students develop alternative frames of reference to agentively position themselves vis-à-vis their home and host societies. In so doing, they embark on a journey to re-conceptualizing the meaning of studying abroad and the process of becoming transnational migrants. These findings are further discussed in the dissertation in relation to the imperative for developing an anti-racist and decolonizing agenda for promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion against the backdrop of the continued internationalization of American HEIs.

This study examines how the extent of religious engagement affects the higher education experiences of Muslim students attending college or those who have recently graduated from college. I also consider if participation in religious student groups play a role in how Muslim students engage with higher education. I interviewed six self-identifying Muslim students to better understand their viewpoints regarding higher education and their degree of religious practice. By using interviews to understand the perspectives of Muslim students related to education and religion, this work will contribute useful knowledge on how education and religion overlap in the lives of many Muslim students who prioritize these aspects. This paper concludes that Muslim students have an overall satisfaction with their educational experiences when considering their religiosity and the religious tolerance of the campus they attend. Additionally, Muslim students were found to prioritize both their education and religion while attending higher education institutions.