Contents

Executive Summary

Foreword

Introduction, Context, and Overview

Definitions and Conceptual Framework

Major Theoretical Perspectives on Student Success in College

Sociological Perspectives

Organizational Perspectives

Psychological Perspectives

Cultural Perspectives

Economic Perspectives

Summary

The Foundation for Student Success: Student Background Characteristics, Precollege Experiences, and Enrollment Patterns

Student Demographics

Family and Peer Support

Academic Preparation and Motivation to Learn

Enrollment Choices and Patterns

Summary

Student Behaviors, Activities, and Experiences Associated with Student Success

College Activities

A Closer Look at Engagement in Effective Educational Practices

Student Characteristics

Summary

Notes

Institutional Conditions Associated with Student Success

Structural and Organizational Characteristics

Programs and Practices

Summary

Propositions and Recommendations for Student Success in Postsecondary Education

Propositions and Recommendations

Needed Research

A Final Word

Appendix A: Note on Research Methods

Appendix B: Indicators of Student Success in Postsecondary Education

References

Name Index

Subject Index

About the Authors

Piecing Together the Student Success Puzzle: Research, Propositions, and Recommendations

George D. Kuh, Jillian Kinzie, Jennifer A. Buckley, Brian K. Bridges, and John C. Hayek

ASHE Higher Education Report: Volume 32, Number 5

Kelly Ward, Lisa E. Wolf-Wendel, Series Editors

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The ASHE Higher Education Report Series is sponsored by the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), which provides an editorial advisory board of ASHE members.

Executive Summary

Creating the conditions that foster student success in college has never been more important. Unfortunately, members of some of the fastest-growing groups in the United States continue to be underrepresented in postsecondary education. Participation rates by African American, Hispanic, and Native American students, first-generation students, low-income students, and students with disabilities continue to lag well behind white and Asian students.

This report examines the complicated array of social, economic, cultural, and educational factors related to student success in college. By “student success,” we mean academic achievement, engagement in educationally purposeful activities, satisfaction, acquisition of desired knowledge, skills, and competencies, persistence, and attainment of educational objectives.

First, the report summarizes the major theoretical perspectives on student success in college: sociological, organizational, psychological, cultural, and economic. It then synthesizes the major research findings related to three key areas: students’ background and precollege experiences, students’ postsecondary activities emphasizing engagement in educationally purposeful activities, and postsecondary institutional conditions that foster student success. Our analysis leads us to seven propositions about student success; we then offer recommendations for action to address each proposition and identify areas where more research is welcome.

Propositions and Recommendations

The trajectory for academic success in college is established long before students matriculate. There is no substitute for rigorous academic preparation in elementary and secondary school. If students do not attain grade-level proficiencies—particularly in math and reading—by the eighth grade, they are much less likely to acquire the needed skills in high school, which makes early intervention even more important.

Recommendations:

• Ensure that all students have rigorous, intensive precollege academic preparation.
• Develop a comprehensive national college readiness strategy that addresses the educational needs of all students.
• Align high school curricula with college performance standards.
• Instill in K–12 educators an assets-based talent development philosophy about teaching, learning, and student success.

Family and community support are indispensable to raising a student’s educational aspirations, becoming college prepared, and persisting in college. The odds of earning a baccalaureate degree increase substantially for students whose families are better informed about postsecondary educational opportunities and costs and who support and encourage their student to prepare for college. Effective school-community partnerships with well-designed college encouragement and readiness programs are also essential.

Recommendations:

• Expand the scale and scope of demonstrably effective college encouragement and transition programs.
• Ensure that students and families have accurate information about college, including real costs and availability of aid.

The right amount and kind of money matters to student success: too little can make it impossible for students to pay college bills; too much loan debt can discourage students from persisting.

Affordability is a critical factor that determines whether students and their families believe college is within reach and worth making the effort to prepare for academically. For many historically underserved students, the perceived—and—in many cases—actual—cost of college is a major impediment to becoming ready for college and seeking admission.

Recommendations:

• Align financial aid and tuition policy so that financial assistance packages meet students’ need.
• Create small pockets of emergency funds to meet students’ financial needs in “real” time.

Most students, especially those who start college with two or more characteristics associated with premature departure, benefit from early interventions and sustained attention at various transition points in their educational journey.

In the first weeks and months of college, underprepared first-generation students and ethnic minorities at predominantly white institutions are especially prone to struggle academically and socially, particularly those from lower income levels. Special efforts are needed to support and encourage these and other at-risk students early in the college experience.

Recommendations:

• Clarify institutional values and expectations early and often to prospective and matriculating students.
• Concentrate early intervention resources on those with two or more risk factors.
• Provide multiple learning support networks, early warning systems, and safety nets.

Students who find something or someone worthwhile to connect with in the postsecondary environment are more likely to engage in educationally purposeful activities during college, persist, and achieve their educational objectives. When students belong to an affinity group, develop a meaningful relationship with one or more faculty or staff members, or take responsibility for activities that require daily decisions and tasks, they become invested in the activity and more committed to the college and their studies.

Recommendations:

• Make the classroom the locus of community.
• Structure ways for more commuter students to spend time with classmates.
• Involve every student in a meaningful way in some activity or with a positive role model in the college environment.

Institutions that focus on student success and create a student-centered culture are better positioned to help their students attain their educational objectives. Among the institutional conditions linked to persistence are supportive peers, faculty and staff members who set high expectations for student performance, and academic programs and experiences that actively engage students and foster academic and social integration such as first-year seminars, effective academic advising, peer mentoring, advising and counseling, summer bridge programs, learning communities, living-learning centers, and undergraduate research programs.

Recommendations:

• Instill in postsecondary educators an asset-based talent development philosophy about teaching, learning, and student success.
• Use effective educational practices throughout the institution.
• Use technology in educationally effective ways.
• Give institutions incentives to identify and ameliorate debilitating cultural properties.

Focus assessment and accountability efforts on what matters to student success. Institutional effectiveness and student success will not improve without valid, reliable information to guide change efforts and monitor performance.

Recommendations:

• Conduct periodic examinations of the student experience inside and outside the classroom.
• Provide incentives for postsecondary institutions to responsibly report and use information about the student experience to improve teaching, learning, and personal development.
• Provide incentives for postsecondary institutions to adopt a common reporting template for indicators of student success to make their performance transparent.
• Further develop state and institutional capacity for collecting, analyzing, and using data for accountability and improvement purposes.

Needed Research

To increase the number of students who earn a baccalaureate, we must:

• Determine the more effective approaches for encouraging different types of students to participate in and benefit from postsecondary encouragement programs.
• Identify effective ways for colleges and universities to inform high schools about their graduates’ college performance and use the information to improve.
• Determine the most efficient way of using financial aid to encourage students’ preparation for college and to make college affordable for students who need financial support to attend.
• Determine what postsecondary institutions can realistically do and at what cost to help academically underprepared students overcome the deficiencies they bring with them to college.
• Verify effective approaches that foster success of different groups of students at different types of institutions.
• Determine responsible, informative ways to accurately measure, report, and use student success indicators for purposes of accountability and improvement.

Conclusion

Who students are, what they do before starting their postsecondary education, and where and how they attend college all influence their chances for obtaining a baccalaureate degree or another postsecondary credential. Postsecondary institutions cannot change the lineage of their students. Campus cultures do not change easily or willingly. Too many long-held beliefs and standard operating practices are tightly woven into an institution’s ethos and embedded in the psyche of faculty leaders and senior administrators, some of which may be counterproductive. Even so, most institutions can do far more than they do at present to implement interventions that can change the way students approach college and what they do after they arrive.

This review demonstrates that we know many of the factors that facilitate and inhibit earning a bachelor’s degree. The real question is whether we have the will to more consistently use what we know to be promising policies and effective educational practices so as to increase the odds that more students get ready, get in, and get through.

Foreword

In this era of No Child Left Behind, higher education is being asked how it can be more accountable. How do we know that college students are learning what we hope they are learning? More important, do we know what we hope they are learning? Both of these questions are difficult to answer, but if we do not answer them, someone else will. Case in point: Secretary Spelling’s final report of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education suggests the need for universal outcome measures for institutions of higher education—a scary prospect. This monograph does not propose a single measure of college students’ success—nor should it—but it does offer a comprehensive examination of what colleges and universities have been doing to hold themselves accountable for student success.

Concerns about how student success is measured are not new. In 1985, Alexander Astin argued that institutions of higher education too often judge their success based on student input characteristics: those schools decreed the best are those that attract the best students. Similarly, when students were not successful, we attributed their failure to the student rather than to the institution. In place of this model, which is still too prevalent today, Astin (1985a) suggested that colleges and universities should control for the input characteristics of their students to determine the value added by the college experience. And he proposed to do so by looking at a variety of outcome measures of student success—learning, grades, retention, graduate degrees pursued, career attainment, to name a few. In this monograph, Kuh and his colleagues have done just as Astin suggested and taken it a step farther. They have compiled the most complete and up-to-date research on the factors that influence student success in college. The monograph looks at the influence of student input characteristics along with student behaviors and attributes that influence their success. Most important, this monograph examines what colleges and universities can do to influence student success. The monograph takes into account who attends college but also holds the institution and its characteristics, policies, and programs responsible for student success. Kuh also uses a broad range of definitions of student success, including students’ perceptions of learning outcomes (proficiency in writing, speaking, quantitative skills), students’ perceptions of personal development (interpersonal competence, humanitarianism), academic achievement (grades, graduation rates), satisfaction, graduate school attainment, and other postcollege outcomes (employment, income, civic engagement).

This monograph makes a very important contribution to the ASHE monograph series. It is comprehensive, covering a range of research on relevant input and output measures, yet accessible and easy to read. It is useful for several audiences, the primary one being those who look at higher education from the perspective of federal, state, and institutional policy. The propositions and recommendations in this book are designed to help those in positions of leadership improve access to higher education as well as to improve outcomes for those who matriculate. The book demonstrates that there are multiple measures of student success and that institutions are holding themselves accountable for achieving these outcomes.

Graduate students also have much to learn from this accessible and complete monograph, including information on the state of the literature on college student outcomes and how to use research evidence to inform policy and practice. And higher education researchers will find this monograph essential, as it establishes the baseline of what we know and how we know it about college student success. This monograph will allow creative scholars to devise new questions and research strategies to extend our knowledge on this important topic.

Lisa E. Wolf-Wendel

Series Editor

Introduction, Context, and Overview

Creating the Conditions that Foster Student success in college has never been more important. As many as four-fifths of high school graduates need some form of postsecondary education (McCabe, 2000) to be economically self-sufficient and deal effectively with the increasingly complex social, political, and cultural issues of the twenty-first century. Earning a baccalaureate degree is the most important rung in the economic ladder (Bowen, 1978; Bowen and Bok, 1998; Boyer and Hechinger, 1981; Nuñez, 1998; Nuñez and Cuccaro-Alamin, 1998; Pascarella and Terenzini, 2005; Trow, 2001), as college graduates on average earn almost a million dollars more over the course of their working lives than those with only a high school diploma (Pennington, 2004). Yet if current trends continue in the production of bachelor’s degrees, a fourteen million shortfall of college-educated working adults is predicted by 2020 (Carnevale and Desrochers, 2003).

The good news is that interest in attending college is nearly universal. Nine of ten high school completers plan to continue their education, with 71 percent aspiring to earn a bachelor’s degree (Choy, 1999). And the pool of students is wider, deeper, and more diverse than ever. Women now outnumber men by an increasing margin, and more students from historically underrepresented groups are attending college. On some campuses such as California State University, Los Angeles; the City University of New York, Lehman College; New Mexico State University; University of Texas at El Paso; and University of the Incarnate Word, students of color who were once “minority” students are now the majority; at Occidental College and San Diego State University, students of color now number close to half the student body.

The bad news is that enrollment and persistence rates of low-income students, African American, Latino, and Native American students, and students with disabilities lag behind white and Asian students; Latino students trail all other ethnic groups (Gonzales, 1996; Gonzalez and Szecsy, 2002; Harvey, 2001; Swail with Redd and Perna, 2003). The educational pipeline is leaking badly. In a widely cited report, the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education (2004b) indicates that only sixty of every one hundred ninth graders graduate from high school; forty immediately enter college, twenty-seven are still enrolled their sophomore year, and only eighteen complete any type of postsecondary education within six years of graduating from high school. These figures underestimate the actual numbers of students who earn high school degrees because they do not take into account all the students who leave one school district and graduate from another or who earn a GED (Adelman, 2006a). But even if the estimates are off by as much as 10 to 15 percent, far too many students are falling short of their potential.

The quality of high school preparation is not always consistent with what colleges expect. In 2000, 48 percent and 35 percent of high school seniors scored at the basic and below basic levels, respectively, on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Only five states—California, Indiana, Nebraska, New York, and Wyoming—have fully aligned high school academic standards with the demands of colleges and employers (Achieve, 2006). Just over half (51 percent) of high school graduates have college-level reading skills (American College Testing Program, 2006). This latter fact is most troubling, as 70 percent of students who took at least one remedial reading course in college do not obtain a degree or certificate within eight years of enrollment (Adelman, 2004).

Rising college costs are another obstacle to baccalaureate degree attainment. From 1990 to 2000, tuition jumped at private universities by 70 percent, at public universities by 84 percent, and at public two-year colleges by 62 percent (Johnstone, 2005). Those hit hardest by cost increases can least afford it. Charges at public institutions increased from 27 to 33 percent between 1986 and 1996 for families in the bottom income quartile but only from 7 to 9 percent for families in the top quartile. For each $150 increase in the net price of college attendance, the enrollment of students from the lowest income group decreases by almost 2 percent (Choy, 1999). As Levine and Nidiffer (1996, p. 159) observed, “The primary weakness of both colleges for the poor and financial aid programs is their inability to help poor kids escape from the impoverished conditions in which they grow up. . . . The vast majority of poor young people can’t even imagine going to college. By the time many poor kids are sixteen or seventeen years old, either they have already dropped out of school or they lag well behind their peers educationally.”

Once in college, a student’s chances for graduating can vary widely. For example, about 20 percent of all four-year colleges and universities graduate fewer than one-third of their first-time, full-time, degree-seeking first-year students within six years (Carey, 2004). Data from Florida community college students as well as institutions participating in the national Achieving the Dream project suggest that about 17 percent of students who start at a two-year college either drop out or do not earn any academic credits during the first academic term (Kay McClenney, personal communication, April 20, 2006). Only about half of students who begin their postsecondary studies at a community college attain a credential within six to eight years. An additional 12 to 13 percent transfer to a four-year institution (Hoachlander, Sikora, and Horn, 2003). Only about 35 percent of first-time, full-time college students who plan to earn a bachelor’s degree reach their goal in four years; 56 percent achieve it in six years (Knapp, Kelly-Reid, and Whitmore, 2006).

Three-fifths of students in public two-year colleges and one-quarter in four-year colleges and universities require at least one year of remedial coursework (Adelman, 2005; Horn and Berger, 2004; U.S. Department of Education, 2004). More than one-fourth of four-year college students who have to take three or more remedial classes leave college after the first year (Adelman, 2005; Community College Survey of Student Engagement, 2005; National Research Council, 2004). African American and Hispanic community college students who take remedial courses are far less likely to complete their degrees or transfer than their peers who do not (Bailey, Jenkins, and Leinbach, 2005)—in marked contrast to white community college students for whom remedial course enrollment does not seem to significantly decrease their likelihood of completing a credential in six years. As the number of required developmental courses increases, so do the odds that the student will drop out (Burley, Cejda, and Butner, 2001; Community College Survey of Student Engagement, 2005). Remediation is big business, costing more than $1 billion annually (Bettinger and Long, 2005; Camera, 2003; Institute for Higher Education Policy, 1998).

Of the 45 percent of students who start college and fail to complete their degree, less than one-quarter are dismissed for poor academic performance. Most leave for other reasons. Changes in the American family structure are one such factor; more students come to campus with psychological challenges that, if unattended, can have a debilitating effect on their academic performance and social adjustment.

Consumerism colors virtually all aspects of the college experience, with many colleges and universities “marketizing” their admissions approach to recruit the right “customers”—those who are best prepared for college and can pay their way (Fallows, Bakke, Ganeshananthan, and Johnson, 2003). Some evidence suggests that both two-year and four-year institutions have deemphasized the recruitment of underserved minorities (Breland and others, 2002); many state-supported flagship universities are admitting students mainly from high-income families (Mortenson, 2005). These trends will have deleterious consequences for American society at a time when more people than ever before are enrolling in colleges and universities and the country is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse.

Whatever the reasons many students do not achieve their postsecondary educational goals or benefit at optimal levels from the college experience, the waste of human talent and potential is unconscionable. What can colleges and universities do to uphold their share of the social contract and help more students succeed?

This report is an abridged version of work performed for the National Postsecondary Education Cooperative to synthesize the relevant literature and emerging findings related to student success, broadly defined (Kuh and others, 2006). Our purpose is to provide an informed perspective on policies, programs, and practices that can make a difference to satisfactory student performance in postsecondary education. (Appendix A explains research the methods used for this report.)

The monograph is divided into seven sections with an extensive bibliography. We take a cumulative, longitudinal view of what matters to student success, recognizing that students do not come to postsecondary education as tabula rasae. Rather, they are the products of many years of complex interactions with their family of origin and cultural, social, political, and educational environments. Thus, some students more than others are better prepared academically and have greater confidence in their ability to succeed. At the same time, what they do during college—the activities in which they engage and the company they keep—can be the margin of difference as to whether they persist and realize their educational goals.

The following questions guided our review:

• What are the major studies that represent the best work in the area?
• What are the major conclusions from these studies?
• What key questions remain unanswered?
• What are the most promising interventions before college (such as middle school, high school, bridge programs) and during college (for example, safety nets, early warning systems, intrusive advising, required courses, effective pedagogical approaches)?
• Where is more research needed and about which groups of students do we especially need to know more?

We use a “weight of the evidence” approach, emphasizing findings from high-quality inquiries and conceptual analyses, favoring national or multi-institutional studies over single-institution or state reports. Of particular interest are students who may be at risk of premature departure or underperformance such as historically underserved students (first generation, racial and ethnic minorities, low income). We are also sensitive to changing patterns of college attendance. For example, more than half of all students start college at an institution different from the one from which they will graduate. Increasing numbers of students take classes at two or more postsecondary institutions during the same academic term. Equally important, most institutions have nontrivial numbers of undergraduate students who are underperforming, many of whom are men. Identifying and intervening with these students are essential to improving achievement and persistence rates.

Definitions and Conceptual Framework

Given the Strong Demand from various quarters to demonstrate evidence of student success in postsecondary education, we should not be surprised that multiple definitions of the construct exist. Among the more commonly incorporated elements are quantifiable student attainment indicators such as enrollment in postsecondary education, grades, persistence to the sophomore year, length of time to degree, and graduation (Venezia and others, 2005). Many consider degree attainment to be the definitive measure of student success. For the two-year college sector, rates of transfer to four-year institutions are considered an important indicator of student success and institutional effectiveness and will become even more important as students increasingly attend multiple institutions, as we explain later. At the same time, it is important to note that students attending two-year institutions are pursuing a range of goals (Community College Survey of Student Engagement, 2005):

• To earn an associate’s degree, 57 percent;
• To transfer to a four-year school, 48 percent;
• To obtain or upgrade job-related skills, 41 percent;
• To seek self-improvement and personal enjoyment, 40 percent;
• To change careers, 30 percent; and
• To complete a certificate program, 29 percent.

Student success can also be defined using traditional measures of academic achievement such as scores on standardized college entry exams, college grades, and credit hours earned in consecutive terms, which represent progress toward the degree. Other traditional measures are graduate school admission test scores, graduate and professional school enrollment and completion rates, and performance on discipline- or field-specific examinations such as the PRAXIS in education and CPA tests in accountancy.

Some of the more difficult to measure aspects of student success are the degree to which students are satisfied with their experience and feel comfortable and affirmed in the learning environment. Astin (1993b) proposed that satisfaction should be thought of as an intermediate outcome of college. Taken together, students’ impressions of institutional quality, their willingness to attend the institution again, and overall satisfaction are precursors of educational attainment and other dimensions of student success (Hossler, Schmit, and Vesper, 1999; Strauss and Volkwein, 2002).

Student success is also linked with a plethora of desired student and personal development outcomes that confer benefits on individuals and society. They include a range of learning and personal development domains such as cognitive complexity, knowledge acquisition and use, humanitarianism, interpersonal competence, and practical competence (Kuh, 1993); becoming proficient in writing, speaking, critical thinking, scientific literacy, and quantitative skills; and employment, postcollege income, civic engagement, and job and life satisfaction. Although cognitive development and direct measures of student learning are of great value, relatively few studies provide conclusive evidence about the performance of large numbers of students at individual institutions (Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2005; National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, 2004b; Pascarella and Terenzini, 2005). We do not address these important outcomes in this volume, but Pascarella and Terenzini (2005) provide an excellent summary (see also Kuh, Douglas, Lund, and Ramin-Gyurnek, 1994; Kuh and others, 2006).

All these measures of student success have been explored to varying degrees in the literature, and observers generally agree as to their importance. In recent years, a handful of additional elements of student success have emerged representing new dimensions, variations on common indicators, and harder-to-measure ineffable qualities. Examples of such indicators are an appreciation for human differences, commitment to democratic values, a capacity to work effectively with people from different backgrounds to solve problems, information literacy, and a well-developed sense of identity (Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2002; Baxter Magolda, 2001, 2004).

Novel definitions are born out of ingenuity and necessity and may require multidimensional measures, given the increased complexity of the postmodern world and the need for institutions to be more inclusive of a much more diverse student population. For example, although the educational progress of women and minority groups has long been an important policy concern, trend analyses by gender or race typically mask important in-group differences with regard to access and participation (as distinguished from enrollment) rates in postsecondary education. That is, enrollment rates are often calculated as the percentage of high school graduates who are currently in postsecondary education. To more accurately reflect the educational progress of the nation, the proportion of a total age cohort enrolled in postsecondary education or that has completed at least two years of postsecondary education should be calculated. Such analyses better represent racial and ethnic differences in educational progress because the lower high school completion rates of minorities are taken into account (U.S. Department of Education, 1997, 2003b).

Definitions of student success must be sensitive to economic realities and workforce development needs. A high school education is no longer sufficient to succeed in college and the workforce in the twenty-first century (American Diploma Project, 2004). Student success indicators also must be broadened to take into account different types of students such as adult learners and transfer students as well as acknowledge different participation patterns represented by course retention rates and posttransfer performance. Research on student persistence is another area where new concepts have emerged. Studies of first-generation students, adult learners, commuters, and other underrepresented populations show that external factors such as parental encouragement, student expectations, peer support, and finances are important to persistence (Braxton, Hirschy, and McClendon, 2004; Cabrera, Casteneda, Nora, and Hengstler, 1992; Pascarella, Pierson, Wolniak, and Terenzini, 2004; Pike and Kuh, 2005a; Swail, Cabrera, Lee, and Williams, 2005; Terenzini and others, 1996). Adult learners pursue postsecondary education for a range of reasons, including wanting to be better educated, informed citizens (49 percent), enhancing personal happiness and satisfaction (47 percent), obtaining a higher degree (43 percent), making more money (33 percent), and meeting job requirements (33 percent) (Bradburn and Hurst, 2001). For this reason, academic and social self-confidence and self-esteem are other important student outcomes that are receiving more attention. In fact, Rendon (1995) found that the most important indicators of Latino student success include believing in one’s ability to perform in college, believing in one’s capacity as a learner, being excited about learning, and feeling cared about as a student and a person.

Student engagement is another indicator of student success that has received considerable attention in recent years (Kuh, 2001, 2003; Pascarella and Terenzini, 2005). As mentioned earlier, a substantial body of research indicates that once students start college, a key factor to whether they will survive and thrive in college is the extent to which students take part in educationally effective activities.

A broad, holistic definition of student success must include all of these indicators and speak to three questions:

For purposes of this report, student success is defined as academic achievement; engagement in educationally purposeful activities; satisfaction; acquisition of desired knowledge, skills, and competencies; persistence; and attainment of educational objectives.

Figure 1 is the guiding framework for our analysis. Instead of the familiar “pipeline” analogy depicted by a direct route to educational attainment, a more accurate representation is a wide path with twists, turns, detours, roundabouts, and occasional dead ends that many students encounter.

The first section of the path represents students’ precollege experiences. We summarize the effects of family background, their precollege academic preparation, enrollment choices, and financial aid and assistance policies on various dimensions of student success. In Figure 1, mediating conditions are represented as transitions that students must successfully navigate to continue their education. They include remediation courses that do not count toward graduation but are necessary to acquire college-level academic skills, financial aid policies that facilitate or hinder their continued enrollment, and the need to work many hours off campus, which can prohibit students from fully engaging in the college experience. If students do not successfully navigate these screens, they may be temporarily or permanently separated from the college experience.

The next part of the path—the college experience itself—includes two dimensions: student behaviors and institutional conditions. Student behaviors include such aspects as the time and effort students put into their studies, interaction with faculty, and peer involvement. Institutional conditions include resources, educational policies, programs and practices, and structural features.

At the intersection of student behaviors and institutional conditions is student engagement, which represents aspects of student behavior and institutional performance that colleges and universities can do something about, at least on the margins. High levels of purposeful student-faculty contact and active and collaborative learning supported by institutional environments perceived by students as inclusive and affirming are related to student satisfaction, persistence, educational attainment, and learning and development across a variety of dimensions (Astin, 1984, 1991; Chickering and Gamson, 1987; Chickering and Reisser, 1993; Kuh and others, 1991; Pascarella, 2001; Pascarella and Terenzini, 1991, 2005; Pike, 1993; Sorcinelli, 1991).

All these factors are inextricably intertwined and affect what students do during college and how they grow, change, and benefit in other ways from the experience. The next section briefly reviews the major theoretical perspectives that help explain student success.