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With this volume we seek to demonstrate the ways that we as scholars turn our quantitative skills toward asking and answering critical questions in higher education research. We examine a variety of higher education issues from a critical stance, using quantitative methods. Collectively, our work demonstrates ways of moving beyond traditional conceptualizations of quantitative research. We use our scholarship to push the boundaries of what we know by questioning mainstream notions of higher education through the examination of policies, the reframing of theories and measures, and the reexamination of traditional questions for nontraditional populations. Although the work presented here is divergent, the commonality of the presentations lies in each scholar’s critical approach to conventional quantitative scholarship.

In the following chapters the authors focus on research questions rather than methods or findings. They describe the ways conventional research drove them to the questions of their studies, and then tell how those results challenged the status quo. Because the perspective of this volume is on the framing of the research questions, methods and results are secondary and are presented only to illustrate various applications of critical quantitative inquiry. We hope to demonstrate that being a quantitative criticalist comes with the questions we ask, not with the methods we use to answer them.