Despite the increasing visibility of transgender students on college campuses, there is a dearth of research understanding their experiences in the classroom. It is important to understand their needs because instructors may lack preparedness or willingness to foster supportive environments for transgender students. Additionally, some students may be marginalized by campus spaces or policies reinforcing gender binary systems and by rigid gender role behavior of peer groups.

Pryor sought to reduce this knowledge gap by interviewing five self-identified transgender and genderqueer students at a major research university. Pryor wanted to understand how these students experience classroom environments and how these experiences at a research university influence their overall college experience.

Four themes emerged from the interviews. First, the coming out process appeared to provoke anxiety in the students, but they felt more comfortable coming out in smaller classes. Second, students reported feeling disrespected by faculty who were resistant to using chosen gender pronouns or who outed students during attendance in class. While some of the students had affirming interactions, others felt that instructors did not support them in the classroom environment. Third, some students reported positive peer experiences and felt supported while others reported experiencing harassment or feeling dehumanized. Fourth, the course context and campus interactions dictated whether the students felt comfortable. For example, students felt more comfortable in gender studies courses than in a language course where, in teaching gendered pronouns, the instructor continually misgendered the student. Students also found support in services provided by the LGBTQ resource and social justice center and in counseling services. Pryor hopes these findings encourage promotion of institutional policies and practices that are inclusive of the transgender student community.

You can read the full article here:

Jonathan T. Pryor, Out in the Classroom: Transgender Student Experiences at a Large Public University, Journal of College Student Development, 2015.

Sarah Garcia is a graduate student in Sociology at the University of Minnesota who studies population health and inequality.

1. What led you to do this research?

In the U.S., the College for All movement produced a cultural expectation that American youth will go to college. Yet millions of students do not earn a degree, and many students beginning at community colleges spend years making little or no progress toward a credential. Existing research about how disadvantaged students’ goals change over time largely relied on assumptions about the social-psychological process entailed in falling short of college aspirations. We wanted to understand the experiences of students who “hold steady,” continuing to plan a degree despite hitting roadblocks along the way.

2. What should everyone know about what you found?

While policy debates about the importance of college largely focus on returns in the labor market, our respondents also understood college-going as having moral and expressive value. Of course, seeking a degree reflects the pragmatic pursuit of middle-class jobs and lifestyles. However, the women we studied also used college plans to respond to a cultural imperative to strive and be ambitious. It is critically important to have strong community colleges that offer effective institutionalized pathways to realize ambition and provide students with socially-recognized identities.

3. What are you going to do next on this topic?

Kelly is interested in how young adults abandon their college aspirations. Holding steady provides a form of moral equity for disadvantaged students. Those who let go leave behind a valuable source of identity and worth.  Nicole will study how potential returners make decisions about re-enrollment. As for-profit institutions and distance learning technologies diversify programs available to returners, busy adults have new options to choose from. How do these choices affect their chances for success?

You can read the full articles here:

Kelly Nielsen, “Fake It’til You Make It”: Why Community College Students’ Aspirations ‘‘Hold Steady’. Sociology of Education, 2015.

Nicole M. Deterding, Instrumental and Expressive Education: College Planning in the Face of Poverty. Sociology of Education, 2015.

Even though the U.S. census shows a growing population of multiracial people, there is a lack of research regarding the experiences of mixed-raced college students. Vast evidence exists regarding the prejudice and discrimination experienced by monoracial minority students. There have also been hints of similar essentializing and exclusionary experiences from the minimal research on multiracial identity formation, development, and challenges. With this in mind, Museus, Sariñana, and Ryan conducted research to determine how mixed-race students cope with prejudice and discrimination.

Interviewing college students at East Coast institutions, the authors found that students used four main coping strategies in response to prejudice and discrimination: 1) educating people about mixed-race identity through informal conversations and formal campus programming; 2) using support networks such as campus clubs and friends; 3) practicing fluidity in their identities by focusing on the features they shared with whichever racial group they were currently with; and 4) averting conflict by avoiding specific places where they might face discrimination or choosing to minimize derogatory comments made by peers.

This research highlights the need for campuses to acknowledge and support the unique experiences of multiracial students by infusing multiracial issues into the curriculum, supporting the situationally fluid identities of students, offering multiracial campus clubs, and providing campus-wide racial and multiracial dialogues, as well as other educational opportunities.

Read the full article here:

Samuel D. Museus, Susan A. Lambe Sariñana, & Tasha Kawamata Ryan, A Qualitative Examination of Multiracial Students’ Coping Responses to Experiences with Prejudice and Discrimination in College, Journal of College Student Development, 2015.

Colleen Rost-Banik is a graduate student at the University of Minnesota who studies race, gender, and sexuality in education.

The disparity between students with and without disabilities has been eradicated in high school completion rates. For postsecondary outcomes, however, it remains substantial.  A 2003 report by the National Council on Disability noted that while college attendance for students with disabilities has tripled, these students on average take twice as long to obtain credentials as students without disabilities, and most required disability services.

Barbara Hong wanted to understand how students with disabilities viewed their college experiences to identify issues affecting their postsecondary outcomes. To discover this, she had sixteen students utilizing disability services at a small suburban college journal over 10 weeks about their college experiences.

Hong identified four major themes in the journals: instructors’ perceptions, relationships with advisors, the stress of college, and the quality of support services. First, students often avoided disclosing their disability to instructors out of fear and felt judged for needing accommodations; felt as if instructors perceived them as being less capable; and felt that instructors were insensitive, mistrustful and cynical towards them. Second, most students felt that academic advisors were unresponsive when students requested help, and that they lacked knowledge in advising them regarding coursework. Third, students frequently felt stressed and frustrated due to physical demands or distractions in the classroom and to mental or emotional struggles with accepting their limitations and identities. Finally, negative encounters with the disability personnel assessing eligibility status contributed to some students’ difficulty in advocating for themselves.

Hong concluded that students experience critical barriers and discussion of these will hopefully move higher education administrators to improve service delivery and support for students with disabilities. Appropriate interventions are critical in promoting retention among college students with disabilities.

Read the full article here:

Barbara S. S. Hong. (2015). Qualitative Analysis of the Barriers College Students With Disabilities Experience in Higher Education. Journal of College Student Development, 56(3), 209-226.

Sarah Garcia is a graduate student in Sociology at the University of Minnesota who studies population health and inequality.

The relationships students form with their guidance counselors impact their college-application success. For even the most-prepared high schoolers, applying for college can be daunting. For some minority, low-income, and first-generation students, it can seem like an insurmountable obstacle to college. That’s why when parents lack concrete information despite being eager to help, students often turn to counselors to walk them through the process.

To better understand how trusting relationships are created, Megan Holland interviewed 89 students and 22 school counselors at two racially and socioeconomically diverse high schools with high graduation rates. She spent two years observing the schools and attending their college fairs, parents’ nights, and financial aid nights. At both schools, counselors struggled to meet the demands of two very different groups: “the wealthy, high-powered student population who attend highly selective colleges” and “the lower-income population struggling to graduate.”

Holland found that trust was developed through shared understandings of expectations and roles. More-advantaged students, prepared by their parents, tended to come in on the same page as their counselors. In contrast, less-advantaged students tended to struggle more with the application process and were often mistaken as lacking effort or motivation. Holland shows that this misunderstanding may occur because some counselors, though they worked to provide more information, didn’t necessarily recognize when students needed help accessing and using it.

Some counselors were more successful in establishing trust with less-advantaged students, and they suggest strategies for improving this group’s access to college information. These counselors were more proactive in seeking out students who missed deadlines, they made a point of clearly communicating their expectations, and they demonstrated personal regard for students by supporting their goals.

You can read the full article here:

Megan M. Holland. (2015).  Trusting Each Other: Student-Counselor Relationships in Diverse High Schools. Sociology of Education, 88(3), 244-262.

Amy August is a graduate student in Sociology at the University of Minnesota who studies education, parenting and childhood, sports, and competition.

Black women doubled their college participation between 1971 and 2005. However, graduation rate successes have not always followed the increase in participation rates. To explore this further, Rachelle Winkle-Wagner investigated the state of research on college success for Black women by reviewing relevant literature and identifying both how Black women in college have been studied and what kind of information results from these studies.

Winkle-Wagner examined 119 studies on African American undergraduate women’s experiences after enrolling in college. The studies she examined ranged across disciplines and methods.  In the review, Winkle-Wagner identifies three primary ways in which Black women’s lives have been narrowed down in research: 1) individual factors are overemphasized, 2) analyses tend to focus on Black women as a homogenous group, and 3) completion of a degree program is often the only indicator of success.

Even when studies focus on relationships or institutions rather than individuals, Winkle-Wagner argues that these studies still focus on relationships between two actors (individuals) or Black women’s need of institutional support to fill in gaps or deficiencies. While much research has highlighted Black-White comparisons, these studies reify White as the standard and again suggest Black students need to measure up to White students’ successes.

Winkle-Wagner provides a number of suggestions for further research. Quantitative studies should include multilevel analysis to reveal more about intersections of race and gender, sexuality, immigration status, etc. Likewise, qualitative studies should focus on differences within Black women college students. In addition, Winkle-Wagner calls for further research on the influence of peers, parents, and mentoring on Black women’s success in college.

Read the full article here:

Winkle-Wagner, Rachelle. 2015. Having Their Lives Narrowed Down? The State of Black Women’s College Success.  Review of Education Research 85(2): 171-204.

Allison Nobles is a graduate student in Sociology at the University of Minnesota who studies gender, sexuality, and violence.  Follow me on Twitter @Allison_Nobles.

The importance parents place on their children having certain skills before entering kindergarten influences what they do to prepare them. Often parents’ school-readiness beliefs relate only to academic skills. However, education researchers actually measure cognition and general knowledge, language development, approaches toward learning, social and emotional development, physical well-being and motor skills to assess school readiness. So, are parents’ efforts to prepare their kids for kindergarten paying off?

Jaime Puccioni uses information about a nationally representative group of children to investigate how parents’ school-readiness beliefs are related to learning activities done with children, what Puccioni calls “transitional practices,” and to children’s growth in reading and math from kindergarten through first grade. To assess readiness beliefs, parents were asked how important it is for their children to be able to do things like count, draw, recognize the letters of the alphabet, communicate, stay calm, and share, for them to be ready for kindergarten. Then they were asked how often they use eight transitional practices–reading books, telling stories, singing songs, playing games or puzzles, playing sports, teaching about nature, making art, and building things together.

Unsurprisingly, Puccioni found that parents who saw school readiness as more important engaged in more transitional activities, and that those who engaged in more transitional activities had children with higher achievement scores at the beginning of kindergarten. But less intuitive was her finding that affluent parents in the study engaged in more transitional activities, though parents of all social classes valued the importance of readiness equally. That social class made a difference suggests that intervention programs teaching parenting practices could benefit from addressing parents’ school readiness beliefs and expectations (and from making some of these practices more affordable).

You can read the full article here:

Jaime Puccioni. (2015). Parents’ Conceptions of School Readiness, Transition Practices, and Children’s Academic Achievement Trajectories. The Journal of Educational Research, 108(2), 130-147.

Amy August is a graduate student in Sociology at the University of Minnesota who studies education, parenting and childhood, sports, and competition.

Education is not the great equalizer it is often thought to be, specifically when it comes to race. Michael Gaddis explored whether college selectivity affects labor market outcomes differently based on the race of the applicant. He did this to determine if economic inequality among college educated people of different races can be explained by racial discrimination in the labor market or by differences in human capital.

Some scholars contend that employers choose white candidates over black candidates more frequently due to differences in school quality, curriculum, and other indicators of human capital. To test this explanation, Gaddis created pairs of fictitious candidates, one black and one white, with degrees from similarly prestigious institutions. He assigned candidates common names on birth records associated with a particular race. The “candidates” applied for 1,008 jobs in three geographic regions in the U.S. that were listed on a national job-search website. Focusing on candidates who received a response, he analyzed how race and college selectivity influenced the occupation type and potential salary range offered.

The results suggest that credentials from an elite university do not provide the same occupational opportunities for blacks as they do for whites in the labor market. Gaddis found that when employers responded to black candidates, it was for jobs with lower starting salaries and lower prestige as compared to whites. Gaddis concluded that this has important implications for current debates regarding affirmative action.

You can read the full article here:

Gaddis, S. M. (2015). Discrimination in the credential society: an audit study of race and college selectivity in the labor market. Social Forces, 93(4), 1451-1479.

Sarah Garcia is a graduate student in Sociology at the University of Minnesota who studies population health and inequality.

1. What led you to do this research?

“Everyone knows” that racial/ethnic minority students are over-represented in special education programs. We wondered whether this is actually true, especially given recent policy efforts to counter this perceived reality.

2. What should everybody know about what you found?

When you compare students who are the same with respect to family socioeconomic origins, test scores, and so on, racial/ethnic minority students actually have lower special education placement rates and lower rates of diagnosis for learning disabilities, speech/language impairments, intellectual disabilities, health impairments, emotional disturbances and ADHD.  This despite the fact that these students tend to experience less healthy environments growing up with respect to poverty, violence, segregation, exposure to lead and other toxins. Contrary to current policy initiatives, we need to seek to provide more — not fewer — special education services to these children.

3. What are you going to do next on this topic?

There are many things we’d like to study.  The data we analyzed come from a national sample of children who entered kindergarten in 1998.  Since then, the data collection has been replicated with a sample of children who entered kindergarten in 2010.  We want to see whether the patterns we found with the older data are still occurring recently.  We would also like to learn more about how environmental conditions lead to disability, and which characteristics of families, neighborhoods and schools are most likely to lead to under diagnosis of disabilities in minority children. We would also like to learn how special education services can become more effective in helping children to overcome disabilities.

You can read the full article here:

Paul L. Morgan, George Farkas, Marianne M. Hillemeier, Richard Mattison, Steve Maczuga, Hui Li, and Michael Cook. (2015). Minorities Are Disproportionately Underrepresented in Special Education: Longitudinal Evidence Across Five Disability Conditions. Educational Researcher.