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Although former foster youth desire to pursue higher education, childhood trauma and educational instability, among other experiences, contribute to low college enrollment and completion rates. Through the lens of the ecological systems model, the researchers sought to understand the internal and external factors that former foster youth believe have contributed to or impeded their choices to attend and ability to navigate college. Twenty-three former foster youth currently enrolled in a college or university participated in semi-structured interviews that asked them to explain influences on their preparation for pursuing higher education, their decisions to attend college, and their ability to navigate college life successfully. Findings indicated that youth relied on caregivers, high school counselors, social workers, and child welfare staff who prepared them for college and helped make decisions to apply. They also reported internal motivations to attend college. In college, they relied on campus resources (e.g., extra-curricular activities, faculty) to navigate college life. They reported lingering family problems, lack of family support, and racial/ethnic stereotyping on campus that impacted their college experiences. Their stress was managed by seeking counseling and increasing their campus involvement. Implications suggest that supportive resources should be holistic and include pre- and post-college enrollment academic guidance, family and fictive kin support, positive peer relationships, child welfare agency support, and elimination of social stigmas that can undermine youths' sense of self-efficacy and future. With increased awareness of needs, colleges or universities and professionals will be better equipped to implement targeted supports for this unique, non-traditional population. Highlights: College-bound foster youth lack consistency in social, financial, and academic preparation to succeed beyond high school. Former foster youth college graduation rates remain significantly low despite increased educational access. Former foster youth need an "eco-network" of school, community, and family-based supports to navigate college. Academia should better prepare to support the specialized needs of former foster youth transitioning into adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To identify first‐year undergraduate students' concerns about college and examine how family support and resilience influence the relationships between family communication patterns and adjustment to college. Background: Nearly half of undergraduate college students in the United States do not graduate within 6 years. Low graduation rates come at high costs to students and universities. A deeper understanding of the family factors that contribute to adjustment concerns may provide retention‐focused intervention opportunities. Method: Survey data collected from precollege students (N = 2,252) were used to test a moderated mediation model in which family communication patterns are associated with adjustment concerns through resilience and family support. Results: Conversation orientation was related to higher family support, whereas conformity was related to lower resilience and family support. Interaction results indicate that the effects of conversation orientation on some adjustment concerns depended on conformity ratings. Resilience mediated the relationship between the orientations and adjustment concerns. Conclusion: Conversation and conformity orientation play a role in perceptions of family support, student resilience, and an array of concerns held by students as they enter college. Implications: Parents may play an important role in helping their child adjust to college through the family communication environments they create and reinforce from childhood and through the support they provide during the transition to college. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since mid-2007, the United States has experienced the direst economic recession since the Great Depression. While considerable institutional resources have been spent on boosting 4-year graduation rates, many college students purposefully delayed graduation, waiting to enter the labor market until the overall economic situation had improved. The survey results suggested that students who were unemployed, who knew someone being laid off, who were pessimistic about the job market, or who targeted private industry jobs tended to stay in school longer. These results support the well-documented warehouse hypothesis: that students use schools as warehouses to shield themselves from the deteriorating job market. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses how great is the need for interdisciplinary environmental health professionals and if the U.S. is meeting that need as of September 2015. Topics include what can be done to strengthen the profession to ensure its competence in the applied science areas of the profession, data on employment in the profession and related occupations, and the ongoing work of the Association of Environmental Health Academic Program.

Current literature proposes several strategies for improving response rates to student evaluation surveys. Graduate destination surveys pose the difficulty of tracing graduates years later when their contact details may have changed. This article discusses the methodology of one such a survey to maximise response rates. Compiling a sample frame with reliable contact details was most important, but may require using additional sources of information other than university records. In hindsight, graduates should have been contacted prior to the survey to introduce it and stress its importance, while email and postal reminders appeared to have a limited effect on non-respondents. Due to varying response rates between participating universities, online responses were augmented with a call centre administering the survey telephonically to non-respondents. Although overall differences between online and telephonic responses appeared to be small, certain question items may need to be treated with caution when conducting telephonic surveys. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years, colleges across the nation are imperiled with declines in student enrollment, budget cuts and rising costs of higher education (Pope, 2013). The federal student aid programs, including Pell Grant, were created to increase access to postsecondary education. In 2012, the Federal Pell Grant Program was subjected to numerous revisions that could result in a substantial number of students losing their Pell within one to two semesters from their graduation. Pell Grant changes are likely to negatively impact revenues of many colleges and universities. This paper examines the effect of the reduction of maximum semesters Pell Grant can be awarded on expected graduation rates and overall college enrollment for Virginia's rural community colleges. Rural community colleges are chosen because community colleges in rural areas are more dependent on Federal grants than other types of higher learning institutions. This empirical research suggests that Pell Grant modifications requiring a reduction in the maximum number of semesters of eligibility will have a significant impact on cohort size at the beginning of each fall and graduation class sizes at the end of each semester in Virginia's rural community colleges. The decline in enrollment negatively impacts the revenue stream for these community colleges. It is debatable that factors such as improvement in employment rates and improvement in the local job markets may have a larger impact on college enrollments than Pell Grant modifications. The research may help community colleges as they work to increase enrollment and lobby for additional funding and revenue sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a summary of findings on performance funding to higher education in the U.S. It discusses impacts on institutions in areas including funding, awareness of goals of state funding and of institutional performance, and status of competition among colleges and universities. It considers consequences on student outcomes such as retention and graduation rates and completion of remedial education.

The article presents findings on impediments to the effective realization of goals and objectives of performance funding to higher education in U.S. states including Tennessee, North Carolina and Florida. It discusses questions raised by officials of institutions on measurements used to determine institutional performance including learning assessments, retention and graduation rates, and job placement rates.

The article presents the findings on the impact on student outcomes of performance funding for higher education in the U.S. It discusses changes in outcomes including graduation numbers and rates, retention rates, rates of completion in remedial education in states including Florida, Pennsylvania and South Carolina.

Introduction: The statistics of unemployed university graduates represent an inappropriate relationship of higher education curriculum and industry field and careers and potentials that exist in industries. This reveals the lack of necessary specialties in the industries and increasing of educated unemployed people that do not have necessary skills. Competency-based curriculum development is a strategy that can be beneficial for students and professionals and develop basic competences and provide knowledgeable professionals for employment in the industry and consequently reduce the number of unemployed graduates and increase the effectiveness of higher education and industry. This review article was written with the aim of describing the position of competency-based curriculum. Conclusion: Few researches performed in the field of graduates' employment in Iran have shown that the curriculums of higher education haven't been much of a success in flourishing and reinforcement of competencies required in different fields and this leads to the waste of expenditure and efficacy reduction due to lack of competency. Competency-based curriculums can be used in order to train competent graduates. Those who develop curriculums must pay attention to the fact that curriculums must be designed in a way that can create and reinforce essential competencies in graduates for providing their success both in occupational and personal life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the employability of UKM graduates for the past five years (2006 2010). The employability of our graduates has consistently improved through the years. Medical and dental cohorts have less problems finding gainful employment compared with cohorts from other disciplines. Since 2008, our graduates have made inroads into sectors hitherto unexplored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]