Student Affairs
Who has access to higher education today? At what financial and personal cost? Based on what conditions and criteria? How do students describe and interpret their experiences? And how can institutions facilitate and constrain successful participation and completion?
These research studies extend current understandings of what it is to be a student in higher education by embracing the dynamic relationship between students as agents and institutions as living structures which impact on their lives. Focusing on the diverse experiences of today’s non-traditional and traditional students, researchers explore how and why institutional rhetoric of inclusion, engagement, gender, and access may or may not be reflected in the reality of students’ experiences. Student Affairs moves from theory to application by suggesting realistic strategies for addressing the challenges surrounding the interrelation of students and institutions.
Each essay analyzes issues of access and participation in programs ranging from community college developmental studies to graduate studies. As a whole, this collection is a testament to how much institutional change has occurred in the social organization of postsecondary education, and how much more change is required to meet the challenge of equitable access and inclusion.
Students and scholars of higher education, educational policymakers, and current secondary and undergraduate students and their parents will find this book essential reading. The results, implications, and recommendations offered in each chapter will be readily transferable throughout North America and beyond.
Across a range of different education settings and curricular programs the themes return again and again to getting it right for students. Through both their experiences and their voices, students are the empirical heart of all this work. Significant lessons are here for researchers, educationalists, students, and policy advocates.
Read this book in the mood of opening towards others, in the sense in which Joseph Knecht in Hesse’s Magister Ludi finds information, artistry, creation and challenge outside the academic game.
Foreword / Neil Guppy
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Today’s Post-Secondary Students -- Adding Faces to Numbers / Lesley Andres
1 Equity in Access and Outcomes: Succeeding along the Science Pipeline / Maria Adamuti-Trache
2 It’s No Five O’Clock World: The Lived Experience of Re/entering Mothers in Nursing Education / Sharon Liversidge
3 A Tunnel of Hope: The Experiences of Student Mothers Attending a Community-College-Based Developmental Studies Program / Donna McGee Thompson
4 Visitors in the Classroom: The Academic Experiences of Students Who Are Hard of Hearing / Ruth Warick
5 Disciplinary Affiliation and the Experience of Community among Undergraduate Students / Colleen Hawkey
6 Co-op Education: Access to Benefits or Benefits to Access? / Garnet Grosjean
7 The Four Rs Revisited: Some Reflections on First Nations and Higher Education / Michael Marker
8 Welcome to Canada? The Experiences of International Graduate Students at University / Regina Lyakhovetska
9 The Transition from High School to Post-High-School Life: Views of the Class of ’88 / Gabriel Pillay
Conclusion: From Research to Action / Finola Finlay
Contributors
Index
Postsecondary Education in British Columbia
Public Policy and Structural Development, 1960–2015
By Robert Cowin
