This mixed-methods study investigates factors associated with beginning community college STEM students’ decisions to transfer in STEM fields, and how students describe these factors as either supports or barriers that undergird their decisions to stay or leave the STEM transfer pathway.

This descriptive phenomenological study explores how 2-year college students participating in STEM classes and programs perceive themselves as learners.

This study examines community college student success through the lens of social capital, including the role of age in shaping the sources and influences of social capital.

Drawing upon national data and two quasi-experimental methods, this study investigates the effect of earning an associate degree prior to transfer on community college transfer students’ success at 4-year institutions.

This study examines the relationship among transfer to four-year institutions of varying selectivity and a rich set of institutional, academic, and individual factors for a national sample of beginning community college students. Conceptually and methodologically, this research extends existing scholarship on transfer by taking into account the heterogeneity of receiving four-year institutions.

Guided by Weidman’s Undergraduate Socialization Theory, this study explores factors influencing the educational expectations and progress of students at a public 2-year college in a Midwestern state.

Drawing upon data from the first and second follow-up interviews of the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS: 2002), this study investigated socio-demographic, motivational, and postsecondary contextual factors that explain community college students‘ baccalaureate expectations.

Financial burden represents a long-standing challenge facing community college students from low-income families, especially those pursuing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) pathways. Accordingly, financial assistance has emerged as a major policy initiative, often offered in conjunction with wraparound support services, such as advising, tutoring, and structured course offerings. Although extant quantitative evidence has demonstrated the promise of financial aid as part of a holistic support structure, there is limited research on the ways in which financial aid interfaces with other types of supports, as well as the experiences of involved students and those in supporting roles. This qualitative case study delved into the lived experiences of individual students and faculty and staff in supporting roles within a new scholarship program at a small community college. Based on in-depth interviews as our primary data source, our findings show that providing financial support is not an omnipotent approach to fully supporting students. Instead, the students as scholarship recipients negotiated a complex set of expectations and assumptions from program faculty and staff who wrestled with an “ideal” student support model. Our study offers new insights toward robust and thoughtful holistic supportive systems that fully honor students’ holistic life contexts, challenges, and strengths.