Graduate Studies

 

First Advisor

Katherine Wesley

Department

Educational Leadership and Higher Education

Date of this Version

Spring 2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Comments

Copyright 2024, Timothy Paul Barshinger. Used by permission

Abstract

The Keystone Education Yields Success (KEYS) program is a welfare-to-work program in Pennsylvania meant to promote financial independence through education. Across the community colleges in the state of Pennsylvania, the KEYS program has often allowed financially disadvantaged students to succeed on par with—and often surpass—their non-KEYS classmates, defying metrics that typically suggest that low-income students will struggle to succeed. The purpose of this study was to understand how and why the KEYS program at a single community college in Pennsylvania was able to foster that level of success. The study was conducted as an instrumental case study of one KEYS program at a Pennsylvania community college. Six student participants were interviewed using semi-structured interviews, developed around Shaun Harper’s Anti-Deficit Framework. Four prominent themes arose from the interview data as potential reasons the KEYS students at this community college are successful: the presence of financial support, a focus on academic and career goals, the development of belonging and connection, and the creation of validation. These findings connect to some of the well-known student success theories in the literature, including Tinto’s theory of social integration (1975, 1993), Schlossberg’s theory of marginality and mattering (1989), Rendon’s theory of validation (1994), and Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy (1977). The study concludes with several implications that may be applied to promote student success in a broader context. Several ideas for future practice and additional research also emerged.

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