Date of Award

2020

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Education

Abstract

The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine whether faculty unionization at community colleges had an impact on student engagement. The dependent variables for this study included five sub-level engagement indicators from the Community College Survey for Student Engagement (CCSSE), including active and collaborative learning, student effort, academic challenges, student-faculty interaction, and support for learners. The independent variables were faculty unionization and union type. The control variables were enrollment, female student percentage, traditional age student percentage, part-time student percentage, first-time full-time fall-to-fall retention, minority student percentage, and percentage of students receiving Pell grants. The sample consisted of 678 students from the 2013 cohort of the CCSSE, which was completed by participating colleges in spring of each year from 2011 to 2013. This dataset was used since this was the last year for which institutional level data was available to researchers through the CCSSE. All 678 participants were employed in the faculty unionization models while only 320 community colleges with a faculty union were included in the union type models (i.e., AAUP, AFT, NEA, and independent union), transformed from categorical to binary for the analysis using dummy coding. Linear regression utilizing a block step procedure was used for the analysis. The results indicated that after including the control variables, faculty unionization was a negative significant predictor of three of the five student engagement factors as represented by CCSSE scores (student effort, student-faculty interaction, support for learners). In regards to union type using the same linear regression block step analysis process, only student effort was significantly associated with any of the union types, which had a positive relationship with the AAUP type of union. The findings suggest that faculty unionization does have a negative association with student engagement. At the same time, when looking at only community colleges with unionized faculty, the results suggest that the AAUP union type has a positive association with student effort. The findings of this study indicate the value as well as direction of further research to promote a better understanding of the dynamics and impacts of faculty unionization and type of union on student engagement.

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