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. Bowmanisthe Mary Louise Petersen Chair in Higher Education, senior research fellow inthe Public Policy Center, and director of the Center for Research onUndergraduate Education at the University of Iowa. His work uses a socialpsychological lens to explore key issues in higher education, including studentsuccess, equity and diversity, undergraduate admissions, college rankings, andquantitative research methodology. He has written nearly 100 peer-reviewedjournal articles that have appeared in outlets such as Review of EducationalResearch, Educational Researcher, Educational Evaluation andPolicy Analysis, American Educational Research Journal, Journalof Research on Educational Effectiveness, Sociology of Education, SocialPsychological and Personality Science, and Science Advances. He isalso an author of the third volume of How College Affects Students,which systematically reviewed over 1,800 studies on the short-term andlong-term effects of postsecondary education. Dr. Bowman’s research has alsoreceived popular attention through articles in National Public Radio, TheNew York Times, The New Yorker, The Economist, The Atlantic, The HuffingtonPost, and other outlets. He has received the Association forthe Study of Higher Education’s Promising Scholar/Early Career Award and theUniversity of Iowa’s Scholar of the Year Award.
