Royel Johnson receives the 2026 NASPA Faculty Council Outstanding Publication Award

Royel Johnson, USC Rossier associate professor, is the recipient of the 2026 Faculty Council Outstanding Publication Award by the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) Faculty Council and Faculty Assembly, for his book, From Foster Care to College: Navigating Challenges and Creating Possibilities.

The award recognizes exemplary scholarship to advance knowledge and practice in higher education and student affairs. Among NASPA’s highest faculty honors, it celebrates publications that demonstrate rigorous research, intellectual impact and meaningful contributions to the field.

From Foster Care to College chronicles the lives of 49 college students navigating the U.S. foster care system, examining how the intersection of educational and child welfare systems shapes college access and opportunity. Drawing on in-depth life history interviews, the book illuminates how cross-system fragmentation often constrains potential, while also highlighting resilience, resistance and pathways to postsecondary success.

“I am honored to receive the 2026 Faculty Council Outstanding Publication Award,” Johnson said. “From Foster Care to College was written to make visible how the fragmentation of child welfare and education systems undermines college opportunity for young people from foster care. This recognition signals that the field is ready to move beyond celebrating resilience and toward confronting the institutional failures that make resilience necessary. I’m grateful to NASPA for honoring scholarship that pushes higher education to reckon with its role in producing—or dismantling—inequity.”

Johnson is a nationally recognized scholar whose equity-centered research has reshaped how higher education understands structural barriers to student success. Author of four books and more than 60 articles and chapters, his work examines how institutional policies and campus climates shape outcomes for historically marginalized students and has informed leadership practice and policy across higher education.

Johnson and other 2026 award recipients will be formally honored during the President’s Breakfast for Faculty at the NASPA Annual Meeting. Held in Kansas City this year, the signature event celebrates faculty whose scholarship has had a lasting impact on the profession.