Scholarly Work Includes Investigating Issues Related to High School Completion and College Access

Irvine, Calif., April 1, 2010

In his first address to the U.S. Congress, Barack Obama issued a dramatic call for universal higher education:

Tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma.... [T]his country needs and values the talents of every American. That is why we will provide the support necessary for you to complete college and meet a new goal: by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.

Thurston Domina, assistant professor of Education and Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, is working to make that goal a reality. His work, which focuses on student transitions between high school and college and the rigorous evaluation of educational policies related to that transition, aims to identify effective strategies for helping more students traverse the path from high school to college.

Dr. Domina's recent research has addressed a variety of topics related to high school completion and college access: He has studied high school dropouts and the valid measurement of high school graduation rates; the motivational and educational consequences of California's high school exit exam; the role of rising college expectations on high school student attitudes and effort; the effects of the federal TRIO and GEAR UP college outreach programs, as well as state-level college outreach programs for disadvantaged students in California and Texas; and the ways that college access and affordability policies, such as affirmative action bans and merit-based financial aid programs, influence high school students.

After earning an interdisciplinary BA in social sciences at Wesleyan University, Dr. Domina moved to New York City, where he spent three years working as a journalist and policy researcher. During that time, he became involved in a contentious debate over remedial education at the City University of New York, working with the Association of the Bar of the City of New York to research college access policy and draft recommendations. As a PhD student in the department of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate School and University Center, Dr. Domina worked with Professors Paul Attewell and David Lavin on a ground-breaking 30-year longitudinal study of women who enrolled in CUNY in the early 1970s. The  book that resulted from this study, Passing the Torch: Does Higher Education for the Disadvantaged Pay Off Across the Generations?, won the 2009 outstanding book award from the American Educational Research Association. After earning his PhD and before arriving at UCI, Dr. Domina was a post-doctoral researcher with the Texas Higher Education Opportunity Project at Princeton University.

In his current work, Dr. Domina is particularly interested in uncovering the distributional effects of educational policies and interventions. While much educational research estimates intervention effects, Dr. Domina hypothesizes that many policies have sharply unequal effects. Working with colleagues in education, economics, and sociology, Dr. Domina is working to develop and apply new methods to measure these distributional consequences.