Medical education literature has indicated that, on average, the humanistic orientation of medical school students declines from matriculation to graduation. This humanistic orientation, or humanism, commonly is referred to as attitudes and behaviors that are “sensitive to the values and the cultural and ethnic backgrounds of others” and characterize “a respectful and compassionate relationship between physicians, as well as all other members of the healthcare team, and their patients.” Although a stronger humanistic orientation can lead to better and more positive patient outcomes, the deterioration of humanistic behaviors and attitudes such as integrity, compassion, empathy, and professionalism can largely be traced back to clerkship rotation experiences during the third year of medical school. Because clerkship rotations take place outside the “traditional” classroom at the bedside of real-life patients, medical students rely on the actions and conduct of their clinical instructors to help inform their own patient care principles. In other words, clinical faculty who teach in clerkships play a pivotal role in shaping the humanistic orientations of medical students.

This study examines how highly humanistic clinical faculty guide, teach, and advance their humanism amongst their students, colleagues, and specialty. These highly humanistic physicians were selected from specialties representing opposite ends of the humanism spectrum, e.g. surgery, internal medicine, and pediatrics. Using Bandura’s social learning theory and Spreitzer and Sonenshein’s positive deviance framework, this study employed observational fieldwork and semi-structured interviews to explore the teaching practices of fifteen Teaching Humanism Award (THA) winners within the UCLA Health System. Over the course of nine months, this qualitative data drew from the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of clinical faculty members who had been recognized for their exemplary humanistic teaching practices.

Findings point to the critical impact that role models had on the development and expression of the humanistic orientation of THA faculty. In addition to role modeling, THA faculty pointed to the relationship between clinical expertise, confidence, and comfort within their specialty as primary guides for their humanistic orientations. Observational fieldwork revealed five typologies of THA faculty with regards to teaching humanism – storytellers, active listeners, sensors, communicators, and guardians. Though humanism was readily apparent amongst trainee interactions, advancing humanism within the specialty and the hospital seemed to incur challenges – both philosophically and institutionally. As such, this study concludes with several recommendations revolving around improving the expression, protection, and adaption of one’s humanistic orientation to different audiences and context. Implications for medical education speak to future research into the relationship between humanism and leadership and the longitudinal impact of THA faculty.

Advancing diversity efforts in higher education has long been a complicated, nearly impossible political terrain for senior leaders to navigate (Kezar, 2007). Though still politically fraught, institutional and organizational investments reflect the growing institutional responsibility and accountability around DEI work (Havey et al., 2022; Williams & Wade-Golden, 2013). However, with these investments come heightened expectations, heightened consequences, and heightened discourse. In recent years, with the emergence and focus on Chief Diversity Officers (CDOs) as senior-level leaders within institutions, the conversation and focus have shifted toward them and their role in creating change. While these roles are commonly viewed as solutions to improving and forwarding institutional responsibility to DEI efforts (Arnold & Braun, 2015), there are ongoing questions about their access and relationship to power and their ability to successfully work toward their institutional charge. The central charge of this study was to examine power and agency in institutional leadership and the unique ways in which CDOs understand, experience, and navigate their dynamics. Additionally, it sought to examine how institutional structures and practices advance or impede CDOs’ navigational needs and tactics. The study findings illuminate the various ways in which CDOs understand, experience, and navigate power and agency within their institutional contexts. Moreover, the findings reveal a more nuanced perspective on institutional power dynamics than typically asserted about CDOs and further illustrate how the role is evolving within the university leadership structure. This study contributes to the emerging body of literature on chief diversity officers and qualitative social network scholarship. The study finds that while CDOs have ascended into the senior and executive leadership circles, and thus they hold greater access and sometimes greater influence within the institution, they do not hold unilateral power. Moreover, they oftentimes cannot make the broad, bold changes they may want to make to move efforts forward. Instead, this study finds that through relationship and relational power, even in difficult political terrains, CDOs navigate and create conditions where they can do meaningful work on behalf of their respective institutions. While scholars have long characterized the CDO role as complex because of its unique positioning and institutional charge (Nixon, 2017), this dissertation study is particularly significant as it explores these institutional dynamics directly, seeking to provide more color and specificity to extant scholarship. More directly, it makes a case for political acumen and understanding institutional context as core competencies or needs in these roles. These points build off one another as this political acumen must be situated in contexts that both empower and disempower as CDOs navigate complex, varying, and ever-changing institutional and organizational dynamics. Moreover, it highlights the need for more scholarship, more discussion, and more support for CDOs on managing these interpersonal relationships and their varying orientation to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work. Moreover, as more CDOs' roles take office in all sectors, this study seeks to extend the discussion about the role of the chief diversity officers in university leadership structures, their power and agency, and the extent to which our systems are willing to change. My hope is that this work, along with the current and emerging scholarship, will be critical in moving forward discussions of DEI leadership, power, and organizational change.

Even though post-9/11 veterans now have access to college funding that increases their purchasing power and postsecondary access through the Post-9/11 GI Bill, it is unclear what factors will lead them to pursue a higher education. Historically a majority of veterans will not use their VA education benefits. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' National Survey of Veterans show that on average only 39 percent of all veterans in the U.S. will use their earned postsecondary benefits after leaving the military (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 2001, 2010). This is troubling given that earning money for college is one of the primary reasons cited for enlisting in the military (Eighmey, 2006; Woodruff, Kelty, & Segal, 2006; Zinger & Cohen, 2010) and the financial resources are available through various VA education programs.

This study examined key factors that led post-9/11 veterans to enroll in higher education. A central focus of this study was to identify key factors that explain why a majority of veterans enter two-year and for-profit institutions instead of four-year institutions after leaving active duty. This study used data from the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) of 2002, which is publicly available through the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). First presented was a descriptive portrait of veterans who did and did not enter college, as well as a description of veterans at two-year, for-profit, and four-year institutions. Second, a logistic regression analysis was used to answer the first research question, which sought to examine factors related to veterans' college enrollment. Finally, a multinomial logistic regression was employed to respond to the second research question, which explored key factors that predict veterans' attendance at two-year and for-profit institutions compared to four-year institutions.

The final logistic regression results showed that veterans' educational expectations and the number of friends who planned to enter four-year institutions during high school (peer plans) were the most significant predictors of college enrollment among veterans, even after accounting for gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status (SES), highest math taken in high school, and high school urbanicity. The multinomial logistic regression found that, once veterans' demographic characteristics, high school context, and other factors are controlled for, the highest math taken and educational expectations are the best predictors of enrollment into two-year colleges. Moreover, the multinomial logistic regression results shows that veterans' enrollment into for-profit colleges compared to four-year institutions is also best explained by the highest math courses taken in high school, even after accounting for gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status (SES), educational expectations, peer plans, and high school urbanicity. These findings have implications for policy development and practice at various levels. Given the lack of empirical research on student veterans, this area also needs further research.

Recent figures on the state of poverty within the U.S. and throughout the world suggest that even though advancements in science and technology (S&T) have had a tremendous impact on human capacity, the overall impact of S&T on creating a more equitable world remains limited. Despite the importance of preparing socially responsible graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to address the current state of poverty and inequality, higher education research focused on STEM education has predominantly framed notions of student success with respect to the maintenance of U.S. global economic competitiveness, largely focusing on steering more students into the STEM disciplines and solely developing their STEM competencies to specifically fill workforce roles. The few studies that have examined the development of STEM students' outcomes critical to promoting a more equitable society have generally examined the impact of one program or course.

To address this gap in the literature, this study used frameworks of undergraduate socialization (Vreeland & Bidwell, 1966; Weidman, 1989, 1979) to examine the individual experiences and institutional contexts that affect STEM bachelor's degree recipients' development of two democratic educational outcomes seven years after college entry: social agency and values toward conducting research that will have a meaningful impact on underserved communities. In order to properly account for the nested structure of the data, this study employed multilevel modeling on a national sample of 6,341 STEM bachelor's degree recipients across 271 institutions. Longitudinal student data from the 2004 CIRP Freshman Survey and 2011 Post-Baccalaureate Survey was merged with institutional data from the Integrated Postsecondary Educational Data System and CIRP Faculty Surveys.

Various undergraduate socialization experiences and institutional contexts were found to influence STEM students' democratic educational outcomes, including academic majors, participation in student organizations and research, experiences with faculty, and peer and STEM faculty normative contexts. Findings suggest the importance of taking a comprehensive approach to supporting long-term student development by providing individual experiences and promoting institutional contexts that facilitate students' democratic educational outcomes. The findings have implications for curriculum and program development in STEM education to maximize the development of STEM students' values toward using research and sociopolitical involvement to promote a more equitable society.

In 2014, South Korea launched Incheon Global Campus (IGC), a shared campus where multiple international branch campuses operate together as a consortium of colleges. English is the medium of instruction at IGC, and each member university has autonomous control over the curriculum, staffing, faculty, and admissions of their individual branch campus. The aim of IGC is to provide Korean students with an affordable alternative to traditional study abroad sojourns by allowing students to essentially study abroad in situ. This goal is particularly notable given how South Korea has long served as a primary source country for international students studying abroad in other countries. The South Korean students who attend IGC are uniquely involved in a grand social experiment which complicates our understanding of international education. What does it mean when higher education institutions cross borders, circumventing the need for students to do so? Unfortunately, there has been a lack of attention to this phenomenon, not only in terms of empirical studies, but also in terms of critical theorizing regarding this novel type of international/transnational education and its impact on the student experience. IGC students are clearly different from the rest of the native student population since they are not attending a South Korean university, yet they are not quite “international” either since they do not travel overseas and instead remain immersed in their home environments. In short, they occupy a third space that is simultaneously international and domestic since they are essentially “going global at home”. This study explores the nature of student experiences in this liminal space, and the extent to which this transnational context symbolizes education’s potential to be a either a tool for social reproduction or social mobility. In these unique transnational spaces, students mobilize capital, especially linguistic capital, in ways that highlight a global dimension to Bourdieu’s theory of social fields and social reproduction.

In 2012, the American College Testing (ACT) reported that 81% of Pacific Islander (PI) high school students aspire to earn a bachelor’s degree or higher (the national average is 82%), but in 2014, only 38% of PIs left high school to attend college, and only 18% actually graduated with their bachelor’s degree. This suggests that PI communities have bought into the promise of higher education, but barriers exist that complicate their matriculation. This dissertation is a study of PI college football players, the most visible and vulnerable participants in US higher education today. In 2015, the National College Athletic Association (NCAA) reported that only 11% of PI college football players graduated from the FCS division, compared to their Black (51%) and White (63%) counterparts. This was the lowest of any demographic in all of college sports. While PIs are strategically targeted for athletic labor in college football, the corresponding graduation rates suggest that the relationship between the PI community and US higher education has become one of exploitation.

This dissertation uses cultural and racial frameworks to offer counter-narratives that center PI perspectives, and decolonizes academic spaces that normalize whiteness and operationalize cultural racism in colleges and universities. This study of PI college football players focuses on three components of their college experience: 1) the college choice process (getting in), 2) transition and persistence (staying in), and 3) professional matriculation into the academy (moving on). Accordingly, this dissertation by compilation investigates each component as separate studies – Getting In, Staying In, and Moving On – but as integral parts of the same overarching research topic.

The Getting In findings suggest that PI football players often come to colleges and universities with an over emphasis on sport, while the Staying In findings suggest that PI transition and persistence may be negatively influenced by the invisibility of PIs within the academy, or the underrepresentation of PIs within the general student body, faculty, administration, and staff who represent “attainable” and “realistic” professional aspirations for PI matriculants. The Moving On findings suggest that issues of race significantly impact the experiences of college football players that wish to matriculate into the profession of coaching college football, and offer some explanations for the diversity deficit between the 55% of student-athletes of color that participate in college football, and the 75% of white college football coaches.

Research in higher education has largely overlooked the role of geography in Asian American college students' experiences. Yet, studies from other academic disciplines have demonstrated that different areas of the U.S. exhibit unique social, cultural, and political dynamics related to race. Efforts to cultivate inclusive and supportive campus environments for Asian American students may therefore benefit from understanding the influence of geographic context on their racial identities. This is particularly relevant for Asian American students in the Midwest, a region where Asian Americans are often assumed to be absent but have actually been long present and are now rapidly growing in number. This study therefore sought to explore how the social, cultural, and political contexts of the Midwest influence how Asian American college students make meaning of racial identity.

Guided by theories of ecological systems, racial formation, and racial identity construction, this qualitative single-site case study combined student interviews, observations, demographic analyses, and document reviews to illustrate the multilayered influences on Asian American students' racial identities. Findings suggest that Asian American identity is a contextualized phenomenon, shaped by interactions between external environmental forces and participants' internal meaning-making processes. Specifically, the distinct social, cultural, and political contexts of the Midwest create a unique set of environmental conditions within which participants actively construct their Asian American identity.

These environmental conditions are characterized by different points and degrees of access to race-related knowledge, including particular discourses regarding Asian American identity. Differences between the environmental conditions present in participants' hometowns and those that they encountered in college prompted participants to negotiate and eventually reconstruct their understanding of what it meant to be Asian American. This identity negotiation process varied by participant, informed by their differing experiences with race and racial identity prior to college. As participants' understandings of Asian American identity evolved, so too did their perspective on the role of race in their past, present, and future lives. Overall, this study demonstrates how adopting a geographic lens can enrich the higher education field's understanding of Asian American students, while also offering insights into how to better facilitate the success of this population.