The Emancipatory Power of Collaboration in Educational Research

By Dwuana Bradley January 1, 2023 marked the beginning of my second year as a tenure-track faculty member and member of the Pullias Center. As a newly-minted member of USC’s faculty, with much of my research agenda centered on understanding educational barriers to inclusive access and excellence for Black students, this date subsequently led to a deep reflection on a […]

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Dwuana Bradley Joins Rossier/Pullias Center as Assistant Professor

The Pullias Center welcomes Dwuana Bradley to our faculty! Dr. Bradley brings more than 10 years of experience in qualitative research methodologies and is a former McNair Scholar. Her research examines the ways in which anti-Black sentiment perpetually undergirds the drivers and levers of federal, state, and institutional policies across the P-20 pipeline in ways that (un)intentionally reify the social […]

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New Pullias Center Report Highlights Much Needed Support for Student Parents in Community Colleges

Dr. Adrian H. Huerta leads the nationwide qualitative study that focuses on improving support systems for student parents. A new report that features the myriad ways that community colleges around the country support their student parent populations — as well as what can be improved — has just been released by the USC’s Pullias Center for Higher Education, part of […]

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Dr. Adrian H. Huerta Named NAEd/Spencer Fellow by the National Academy of Education

Dr. Adrian H. Huerta, Assistant Professor in the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the USC Rossier School of Education, has been selected as a recipient of the prestigious 2022 National Academy of Education (NAEd)/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship. Dr. Huerta, who joined Pullias/Rossier in 2019, is one of 25 Fellows selected by NAEd out of an extremely competitive pool of 258 […]

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Gang Youth and Young Adults Can Go To and Graduate From College

By Adrian Huerta In December 2021, President Mike Muñoz of Long Beach City College (LBCC) sent me a congratulatory text that we were the recipient of nearly one million dollars from the U.S. Department of Education to develop a college access and success program for gang-associated youth and young adults. This grant is the first formal collaboration between the USC […]

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Student Parents in Community Colleges: Building Support Systems to Ensure Education Success

By Adrian Huerta In 2018, my colleague Cecilia Rios-Aguilar at UCLA started a multi-year research project on student parents in community colleges with support from a seed grant from the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We sought to understand how student parents make sense of their career and educational experiences in a two-year college. We interviewed […]

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USC’s Pullias Center to Focus on Support Systems for Student Parents with New Grant from Leonetti/O’Connell Family Foundation

Community college student parents experience many struggles and challenges that contribute to being less likely to earn a college degree, credential or certificate, but are more likely to thrive with targeted institutional support systems. The Pullias Center will document the best practices for student parents with support from a grant provided by the Leonetti/O’Connell Family Foundation. The study will focus […]

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LBCC & USC Receive Nearly $1 Million for New Innovative Education Program for Gang-associated Youth

The LBCC Phoenix Scholars will be initiated thanks to U.S. Department of Education grant  Long Beach City College (LBCC) and the University of Southern California (USC) Rossier School of Education’s Pullias Center for Higher Education will receive $990,000 over the next three years from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, U.S. Department of Education (DOE) to collaborate on a […]

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Ecological Validation: Taking the Initiative to Create a Sense of Belonging

By Joseph Kitchen Before the pandemic, many of the typical learning experiences and programming opportunities offered at colleges and universities were simply platforms that enabled students to build connections, community, and belonging. While institutions commonly seek out programmatic and structural solutions to fostering belonging among students—such as first year seminars or a student activity center for instance—they should not lose […]

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Proactive Outreach and Tailored Support: A Recipe for Student Success

By Joseph Kitchen Seeking out connections with students is at the core of another strategy my colleagues and I identified through the Promoting At-Promise Student Success project. Proactive advising outreach and tailored support may offer promising inroads to build relationships with students and foster a sense they are a part of a college community that cares about them and that they are an integral part of […]

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