ENGLISH, DAVID JUDSON. Graduate School Choice: An Examination of Individual and Institutional Effects. (Under the direction of Paul D. Umbach). While significant scholarly attention focuses on the development and testing of theoretically grounded models of the college choice process at the undergraduate level, far less research explores the area of graduate school enrollments. Graduate school choice, which is defined for the purposes of this paper as the decision to pursue any post-baccalaureate degree program at the masters, doctoral-research, or doctoral-professional practice level, is shaped and determined by a number of individual and organizational level characteristics. The relative influence and predictive power of these variables in modeling graduate school choice behaviors is of significant theoretical and practical interest, given the role graduate education plays in access to certain career paths, career levels, and lifetime earnings. This paper addresses a gap in the literature by advancing a conceptual framework of graduate school choice derived from the work of Perna (2006), drawing significantly from human capital theory and incorporating the salient concepts of cultural and social capital. The methodology employed is a set of generalized hierarchical linear models in which students are nested within undergraduate institutions. The dependent variables of interest were graduate school aspiration, application, and enrollment. The dataset analyzed was the 2000/01 Baccalaureate & Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B:00/01). The nationally representative B&B:00/01 study is comprised of approximately 10,000 students who received a baccalaureate degree from

College access for undocumented students in the United States continues to be a politically contested issue in many states across the country. Whereas a growing number have created friendly admission policies, such as in-state tuition benefits, other states—like Georgia—impose restrictive guidelines that work to reduce the number of undocumented students enrolling in public higher education. Through analyzing 26 participant interviews, this study examined how Freedom University, a nonprofit organization, worked to help students further their dream of earning a college degree by creating a college-going climate and sharing social and cultural capital to educate students about their postsecondary opportunities.

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