Receiving a college education has perhaps never been more important than it is today. While its personal, societal, and overall economic benefits are well documented, too many college students fail to complete their postsecondary education. As colleges and universities are investing substantial resources into efforts to counter these attrition rates and increase retention, they are mostly unaware of the robust literature on student success that is often bounded in disciplinary silos. The purpose of this book is to bring together in a single volume the extensive knowledge on college student success. It includes seven chapters from authors who each synthesize the literature from their own field of study, or perspective. Each describes the theories, models, and concepts they use; summarizes the key findings from their research; and provides implications for practice, policy, and/or research. The disciplinary chapters offer perspectives from higher education, public policy, behavioral economics, social psychology, STEM, sociology, and critical and post-structural theory.
Nicholas A. Bowman is the Mary Louise Petersen Chair in Higher Education, senior research fellow in the Public Policy Center, and director of the Center for Research on Undergraduate Education at the University of Iowa. His work uses a social psychological lens to explore key issues in higher education, including student success, equity and diversity, undergraduate admissions, college rankings, and quantitative research methodology. He has written nearly 100 peer-reviewed journal articles that have appeared in outlets such as Review of Educational Research, Educational Researcher, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, American Educational Research Journal, Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, Sociology of Education, Social Psychological and Personality Science, and Science Advances. He is also an author of the third volume of How College Affects Students, which systematically reviewed over 1,800 studies on the short-term and long-term effects of postsecondary education. Dr. Bowman’s research has also received popular attention through articles in National Public Radio, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Economist, The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, and other outlets. He has received the Association for the Study of Higher Education’s Promising Scholar/Early Career Award and the University of Iowa’s Scholar of the Year Award.
