Status: Upcoming

I recently received a grant to conduct a five-year longitudinal interview study with a group of entering college students, with the goal of understanding how US institutions might reduce inequality in pathways from college to work. I am now designing the first year of data collection (as well as the broader project) and seek advice and peer review on my research design. I’ll provide a an overview of the grant proposal, my goals for the project and its basic design, and seek input from all of you.

Entrepreneuriship education encompasses a range of learning experiences designed to foster entrepreneurial skills and mindsets. In recent years Italian universities have invested in entrepreneurship education with various academic programs, extracurricular activities, and resources designed to foster entrepreneurial careers. This study addresses the effectiveness of different entrepreneurship programming among Italian university graduates, with particular emphasis on postgraduate outcomes including employment, entrepreneurial activity, and earnings. My team leverages AlmaLaurea, a consortium of 76 Italian institutions serving approximately 90% of university graduates in Italy annually. AlmaLaurea’s longitudinal data-collection strategy enables observation of student outcomes over five postgraduate years.

We examine the impact of Maryland’s 2017 ban on out-of-school suspensions for grades PK-2, assessing whether a top-down state-initiated policy can influence school discipline practices. The ban, which allows suspensions only in cases where a student poses an “imminent threat,” aims to reduce exclusionary discipline. We address three questions: (1) What was the effect of the ban on discipline outcomes for students in both the targeted early grades and upper elementary grades not subject to the ban? (2) Did schools circumvent the ban by increasing in-school suspensions or by coding more incidents as threatening? (3) Were there differential effects on historically marginalized student groups who are typically suspended more frequently? Using a comparative interrupted time series strategy, we show that the ban significantly reduced, but did not eliminate, out-of-school suspensions in the targeted grades, without a corresponding increase in in-school suspensions. However, racial and other disparities in suspension rates persist.

To further explore the broader implications of school discipline, we link K-8 educational data from the Maryland State Department of Education with incident-level data from the Department of Juvenile Services, observing students’ academic and disciplinary histories leading up to their initial interactions with the juvenile justice system. This analysis tests whether out-of-school suspensions at different grade levels affect the likelihood of early entry into the juvenile justice system, focusing on disparities by race and gender. The results provide insight into the relationship between exclusionary discipline practices and juvenile arrests, contributing to a deeper understanding of the school-to-prison pipeline and the role of school-discipline strategies in shaping student outcomes.

Colleges and universities are under increasing pressure to demonstrate their effectiveness in enhancing student success and employability. Traditional metrics used by researchers and policymakers—such as time to degree completion, postgraduate employment and income—have predominantly overlooked the diversity of student pathways during and after college. The narrow focus has prompted calls for a more comprehensive framework that emphasizes a broader spectrum of pathways to student engagement and success. We introduce a novel multi-engagement model of the research university environment that highlights the significance and interconnectedness of various college experiences: academic engagement in classroom settings; research activities; and extracurricular, civic, and career development. We show that these different experiences and their variable combination are related to distinct and diverse pathways to success. Leveraging over 800,000 survey responses collected between 2012 and 2023 by the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Consortium, the study examines trends in student engagement at 22 US research-intensive universities across five domains: academic, research, extracurricular, civic, and career. We explore interplay among these forms of engagement and their relationship to learning outcomes and student plans.