Join us virtually on Feb. 24 at 10 a.m. when Sara Goldrick-Rab will speak about "Learning from Students: How Longitudinal Mixed-Methods Research Can Change What We 'Know.'" This event is part of the 2025 IRDL Scholars' Speaker Series and open to all.

Nearly 1 in 2 college students starts college but does not finish. Colleges and universities are full of professionals with opinions about why. This session will share what happened when researchers engaged in longitudinal mixed-methods research to examine this challenge among a group of 3,000 low-income students. We’ll think together about how iterative and multi-facted data collection can facilitate the acquisition of new knowledge, test emerging hypotheses, and lead to new conclusions.

About the Speaker

Sara Goldrick-Rab is author of "Paying the Price, College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream," senior fellow at Education Northwest, sociology professor at the Community College of Philadelphia, and founder of Believe in Students, the #RealCollege movement, and the original Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice.

About the Series

The IRDL Scholars Speaker Series is designed to shine a spotlight on voices and ideas that challenge traditional ways of conducting research. It surveys various topics, including specific research methods and critiques of processes associated with western social science approaches, with the intention of inspiring research explicitly rooted in social justice. As librarians, educators, and researchers, we welcome this opportunity to reflect and incorporate what we learn from these speakers into our own research efforts, so that our methodologies integrate anti-racist and anti-colonial practices. The series is coordinated by a working group of IRDL Scholars. Each speaker session is free to attend via Zoom.