​Laurie A. Schreiner chairs the doctoral programs in higher education at Azusa Pacific University. She has more than 30 years of experience in higher education as a faculty member, associate academic dean, and research fellow. Her primary interests include student success and thriving in college, student satisfaction and retention, strengths-based advising and educational practices, Christian higher education, campus climate and sense of community, and the programming needs of first-year students and sophomores.

Schreiner is co-author of both The Student Satisfaction Inventory, which is used on more than 1,600 campuses across the United States and Canada, and Helping Sophomores Succeed (2009). She also has been principal investigator on two federal grants to promote student success and retention, has directed national projects on retention and student satisfaction, and has consulted with more than 100 colleges and universities. Schreiner has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on positive psychology, engaged learning, sophomore success, faculty development, and advising. Her most recent publications include the edited book, Thriving in Transitions: A Research-Based Approach to Student Success, and articles in Journal of Excellence in College Teaching, Journal of College Student Retention, and Journal of College Student Development.

Schreiner is a senior fellow at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities and has served on the board of the National Resource Center for First-Year Students and Students in Transition. She currently directs both the Thriving Project and the Sophomore Experiences Survey.

​Nicole Smith is research professor and senior economist at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, where she leads the center’s econometric and methodological work. She is an expert on education and social mobility and the economics of education and has written most recently on the skills that college graduates need to succeed in the job market. She is part of a team of economists working on a project to map, forecast, and monitor human capital development and career pathways in the United States through 2020.

Prior to joining the Center on Education and the Workforce, Smith was a faculty member in economics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania and the University of the West Indies (UWI), St. Augustine Campus.

Smith graduated with honors in economics and mathematics from UWI. She was the recipient of the Sir Arthur Lewis Memorial Prize for outstanding research at the master’s level at UWI and is co-recipient of the 2007 Arrow Prize for Junior Economists for educational mobility research. She earned her PhD in economics from American University in Washington, DC.

​Patrick T. Terenzini is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior Scientist Emeritus in the Department of Education Policy Studies and the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Pennsylvania State University. His research examines the effects of college on student learning and development, persistence, and educational attainment. He is co-author (with Ernest T. Pascarella) of the two-volume How College Affects Students (Jossey-Bass, 1991 and 2005), a synthesis of 30 years of research on the impact of the college experience on students.

Terenzini also has published more than 150 articles in refereed journals and made more than 250 presentations at scholarly and professional, national, and international conferences. He is a former editor-in-chief of New Directions for Institutional Research, associate editor of Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, and editorial board member for The Review of Higher Education. Terenzini has been the principal or co-principal investigator on research grants totaling more than $13 million from such organizations as the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the Lumina Foundation for Education, the Sloan Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation. He has received research awards from the Association for the Study of Higher Education, the Association for Institutional Research, the American College Personnel Association, the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, the American Society for Engineering Education, and the student affairs associations of New York and Pennsylvania.

Terenzini is past president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education and a three-time winner of the Forum Best Paper Award from the Association for Institutional Research. In 2011, he received CIC’s Academic Leadership Award for his distinguished work as a scholar.