College Access & Completion

In today’s economy, most jobs require some form of post-secondary education and training. Professor Laura Perna has devoted her career to researching and identifying best practices for enabling low-income, first-generation, and racial/ethnic minoritized students to enroll in college and complete a degree. She researches public policies and institutional practices that could help level the playing field and improve equity in higher education attainment, thereby increasing the number of people who reap the many benefits of higher education.

“When it comes to a college education, the American Dream is a myth,” Professor Perna has said. “The American Dream assumes that our nation’s structures and systems allow anyone to succeed, regardless of family income, parents’ education, race/ethnicity, or other demographic characteristics.” But in reality, “our education attainment varies based on these and other dimensions.” For instance, students from higher-income families are much more likely to complete a college degree. College attainment rates are also lower for Hispanic and Black students than for white students.

Professor Perna’s widely cited conceptual model on college access and success (2006) encourages attention to the role of policy and practice by identifying and graphically portraying how college enrollment “decisions” and “choices” are structured for students based on the contexts in which they are embedded, including the K–12 schools they attend and states and communities in which they live. Integrating aspects of economic and sociological approaches, the model assumes that an individual’s decision to attend or not attend college is shaped by the person’s school and community context; the higher education context; the social, economic, and policy context; as well as the individual’s “habitus”—the internalized set of dispositions and preferences that is derived from one’s surroundings and that subconsciously define what is a “reasonable” action is.

Professor Perna has studied and written about many aspects of the complex issue of higher education attainment, including the student debt crisis, inequities in access to rigorous high school curricula, the role of state policy in promoting access, retention of minority students, the needs of working students, the role of counseling in shaping college opportunity, how state-mandated tests can create barriers to opportunity, and more.

She emphasizes that students need three foundations to succeed in college: adequate financial resources, sufficient academic preparation, and “the knowledge and support to navigate their way into and through higher education,” adding that, “our educational systems are not providing students with what they need.”

In 2015, Professor Perna shared her expertise on ways to improve college access and completion for underrepresented groups in testimony to the Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training, Committee on Education and the Workforce, U.S. House of Representatives.

College Promise Programs

Through a comprehensive and multi-faceted program of research, Professor Laura Perna and her research team are advancing knowledge of “college promise” initiatives, programs that provide funding for low-income students to attend college. With a central goal of raising educational attainment in the United States, these programs “promise” a financial aid award to eligible students who live or attend school in a particular place. Professor Perna’s team aims to expand research-based knowledge on this emerging approach for boosting higher education attainment. Program leaders and policymakers can tap into this knowledge to help shape program design, implementation, and evaluation.

Professor Perna and her team compiled a searchable online database of 200 college promise and student grant programs operating in 40 states and Washington, D.C., describing each program’s funding, student eligibility requirements, student demographics, and educational interventions. The database helps states and communities design and structure effective promise programs. Professor Perna has studied and written about many facets of the free-college movement, including: how best to structure college promise programs to promote college success among underrepresented groups; how program design affects equity and efficiency; and the forces that affect how college promise programs are designed and implemented.

With Elaine Leigh, Professor Perna developed a typology of college promise programs that details important differences among programs and provides a foundation for future research.

Drawing on case study data, Elaine Leigh and Jeremy Wright-Kim offer a framework for considering the implications of free community college programs for equity and efficiency and for understanding the forces that influence the characteristics of implemented programs.

Increasing Faculty Diversity

Professor Perna’s concern for equity in higher education extends to issues of faculty diversity and fair practices along racial/ethnic and gender lines. As Vice Provost for Faculty at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, she focuses on advancing the recruitment, retention, development, promotion, happiness, and well-being of faculty, with special attention to equity, diversity, and inclusion. Her research has addressed many facets of faculty diversity, including sex and racial differences in faculty tenure and promotion, retention of Black faculty members, and the relationship between family responsibilities and employment among faculty members. Professor Perna used data from the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty to examine how various family factors—parental status, marital status, and spouse’s employment status—affect a faculty member’s tenure and promotion outcomes. Her analyses revealed that the contribution of family ties to tenure status and academic rank is different for women than for men. Unlike women, men appear to benefit from having children in terms of their tenure status and academic rank and from being married in terms of their academic rank. What’s more, only 49% of female faculty members have at least one dependent, compared with 70% of male faculty members, suggesting that a greater share of academic women are intentionally foregoing parenthood and/or that non-mothers self-select into academics. It is possible that women professors think that the responsibilities of parenthood will lessen their ability to achieve and compete, while men feel less of such pressure. In a study of the status of Black faculty and administrators in public colleges and universities in the South, Professor Perna found that Blacks continue to experience substantial inequities. In the 19 states she and her co-authors examined, the gaps in equity were generally greater for Black faculty than for Black administrators. Among faculty, the degree of inequity for Blacks was greater among higher than lower ranking faculty and among tenured than tenure track faculty. Professor Perna and colleagues used case-study analysis to explore the ways that one historically Black women’s college promotes the attainment of Black women in STEM fields. The findings shed light on the ways that institutional characteristics, policies, and practices may mitigate the barriers that limit such attainment for Black women. The authors conclude their paper in Research in Higher Education with recommendations for improving policy and practice and for additional research.

“An excellent and diverse faculty is at the foundation of an excellent college or university.”

In an opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed, Professor Perna and Sydney Freeman Jr. wrote about the importance of institutional support for mid-career faculty of color to help them stay energized, stave off burnout, and thrive. Effective supports include culturally aware mentoring, coaching, and sponsorship. Coaches and sponsors, the authors wrote, can “help build a mentee’s skills and assist them in gaining recognition for their work and securing new professional opportunities.”

In another recent op-ed, published by Inside Higher Ed, Professor Perna stresses the need for better data about faculty diversity, experiences and working conditions, and (in)equities in measures of success. College and university leaders need more robust data if they hope to build and nurture an excellent and diverse faculty.