Stay Connected

Prep’s Associate Director of College Counseling recently earned a Doctorate of Education with Distinction from the Native American Leadership in Education (NALE) program at the University of New Mexico.

Dr. Danielle Yepa Gunderson’s dissertation title is “Indigenous Land Acknowledgement, Learning Spaces, and Sacred Places as Factors for Native American First-Year Students in Higher Education.” Her research was created for secondary professionals and higher education institutions to evaluate and envision how to serve first-year Native American students best and increase the number of undergraduate degrees earned by future generations.

Native American undergraduate students have the lowest college degree completion rates, between 0.7 percent and 1 percent, of those earning an undergraduate degree (National Center for Education Statistics, 2017). 

Yepa Gunderson’s research was a baseline exploratory study that utilized a quantitative approach to survey first-year Native American students at nine public higher education institutions in the Four Corners region of the United States. 

She found that the top three factors that affected the participants’ college success were financial aid/finances, family support, and academic preparation. The findings point to the importance of providing college counseling for Native students in high schools and academic and cultural support in post-secondary institutions, she said. 

A citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, Jemez Pueblo, and Laguna Pueblo, Yepa Gunderson is also the first generation college student in her family to earn a doctoral degree. She is the first doctoral student from the NALE to earn distinction with a quantitative study. And she graduated with a grade point average of 4.06.

Yepa Gundersoon runs the Native American Sandia Prep Alliance. Congratulations, Dr. Yepa Gunderson!