The College Experience

I explore multiple identity development (Abes & Jones, 2013; Abes, Jones, & McEwen, 2007) among traditional undergraduate students through student involvement (Astin, 1984) and student engagement (Kuh, 2009) experiences within fraternity and sororities, residential students, and student leadership. I attempt to center issues of gender and multiracial identity development. I perceive multiracial identity development (Renn. 2004; 2008) through Multiracial Critical Theory (Harris, 2016; 2017). I explore identity among college men through compensatory and protest masculinities grounded in social constructivist (Connell, 2005; Kimmel & Messner, 2007) and feminist poststructuralism lenses (Weedon, 1997).  Higher education must acknowledge its privileged past and seek a more hopeful, egalitarian future in the wake of such challenges as mental health, substance misuse, student activism, and the good and ill represented in advance technologies (Folbre, 2010; Newfield, 2008).

Student Success

I interrogate issues of student persistence and university retention drawn from a culturally-informed reconceptualization of Tinto’s Academic & Social Integration Model (Guiffrida, 2003, 2006). My work attempts to critique the fundamental attribution error of higher education through my pioneering metatheodel approach. Frederick, Sasso, & Barratt (2015) and Frederick, Sasso, and Maldonado (2018) described the “fundamental attribution error of higher education.” It suggested that American postsecondary institutions assume that all students seamlessly matriculate through a P-16 pipeline as “college ready” in which they fail to hold a foundational understanding of their own students. Therefore, institutions “hamster wheel” in a negative feedback loop in which they continually attempt to improve their retention rates. Within these efforts, many students, such as adult learners or other historically underrepresented populations, do not receive the same equity of student support due to various historical systems of oppression and through exclusion that have privileged college access for other social classes. These interlocking tensions can thus be a cardinal cause for the better, for ill, or for simply sustaining the status quo. They are overarching effects which obviously produce wider and deeper repercussions for colleges and universities. I research student success to explore barriers to individual student persistence and how academic advisors facilitate university retention through

Educational Equity

I draw from critical multiracial theory (MultiCrit; Harris, 2016), intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1987, 1989), and Border Theory (Anzaldúa, 1987) to foreground liminality across different marginalized or historically underrepresented student populations within their co-curricular spaces. These include first-year experience, study abroad, bridge programs, residential education, or other transition programs. It is imperative that higher education/student affairs professionals prepare ample educative encounters for student activities across the quadrangle. Ideally, they should include students themselves in their planning and execution so that they can be real actors in their own learning—one that requires reflection and judgment. Thus, I examine how the diversity of college students can experience cocurricular spaces as agents of their own learning. I interrogate the inequities of how these socially constructed spaces exist and are experienced differently across college student populations.