The objective of the article is to analyse the changes in labour market destinations of geography graduates in selected countries over the last 30 years. Moreover, the paper discusses the results of a Polish study on professional career plans of recent geography graduates and the fulfilment of these plans in 2012. It has been established that key professions in which a geography degree proves useful include: teachers, GIS specialists, and land use/environmental planners. Currently, Polish students would like to work mainly as specialists dealing with analysing and monitoring environmental changes, urban planners, spatial designers and teachers. Sadly, their expectations are hardly ever met and only students looking for teaching positions were most likely to succeed in their job seeking efforts.
Improving student persistence, especially in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, continues to be at the forefront of national educational policy discussions. Living in university housing, with its focus specifically on assisting students in transition, has consistently been positively related to student persistence. Using institutional data and data from a first-year student transition study from all the first-year first-time residential students from Fall 2008 through Fall 2012 (N ¼ 17,850), this study examined the relationship between student characteristics and experiences and retention for STEM and non-STEM students who live in on-campus housing. Results illustrate that experiences that contribute to retention differ between STEM and non-STEM students. Noncognitive factors related to academic self-efficacy, academic adjustment, and degree aspiration positively affect residential students' persistence in STEM. Academic performance was a significant factor in institutional persistence for STEM and non-STEM students. Implications for future and practice are discussed.
This study examined the influence of community college students' engagement on their intention to transfer and major in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) field. The STEM Student Success Literacy Survey was used to collect data among all 15 community colleges in Iowa. The authors developed a measurement model for community college student engagement and used the model to predict students' intention to transfer and major in STEM fields. The engagement measurement model consisted of four constructs: peer engagement, transfer engagement, faculty/staff encouragement/assistance, and faculty engagement on coursework. To predict the students' intention, the logistic regression analysis was employed. The results suggested that students' demographic and background characteristics contributed to predict their STEM aspirations. The study was concluded by implications for policy, practice, and future research.
University and college leaders are tasked with enhancing student outcomes with fewer resources. Student retention is one such key outcome of interest for many policy makers as well as for university administrators. Over the years, administrators have turned to High Impact Practices (HIPs) such as Learning Communities (LCs) to aid in retention. This quantitative study explores the impact LCs have on student retention at a large R1 university in the Midwest. Additionally, the financial return on investment in LCs at this institution is measured via tuition dollars generated from students who are retained as a result of their participation in a LC at the institution. Two key findings of this study are that LCs are positively associated with increased odds of student retention, and that investing in LCs makes good financial sense. Our research contributes to the scholarship on retention attributable to LCs and provides researchers and practitioners with a “template” to evaluate the efficacy of specific retention initiatives in relation to their financial return on investments.
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