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Rodney Hughes

Justin C. Ortagus, Rodney Hughes, Hope Allchin.

This study leverages national data and a quasi-experimental design to examine the influence of enrolling in an exclusively online degree program on students’ likelihood of completing their degree. We find that enrolling in an exclusively online degree program had a negative influence on students’ likelihood of completing their bachelor’s degree or any degree when compared to their otherwise-similar peers who enrolled in at least some face-to-face courses. The negative relationship between exclusively online enrollment and students’ likelihood of bachelor’s degree completion was relatively consistent among White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, low-income, and military students. Findings focused solely on those students enrolled in exclusively online degree programs revealed that the negative influence of exclusively online enrollment was exacerbated when the student attended a for-profit four-year institution.

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Darryl V. Hill, Rodney Hughes, Matthew A. Lenard, David D. Liebowitz, Lindsay C. Page.

Policy makers periodically consider using student assignment policies to improve educational outcomes by altering the socio-economic and academic skill composition of schools. We exploit the quasi-random reassignment of students across schools in the Wake County Public School System to estimate the academic and behavioral effects of being reassigned to a different school and, separately, of shifts in peer characteristics. We rule out all but substantively small effects of transitioning to a different school as a result of reassignment on test scores, course grades and chronic absenteeism. In contrast, increasing the achievement levels of students' peers improves students' math and ELA test scores but harms their ELA course grades. Test score benefits accrue primarily to students from higher-income families, though students with lower family income or lower prior performance still benefit. Our results suggest that student assignment policies that relocate students to avoid the over-concentration of lower-achieving students or those from lower-income families can accomplish equity goals (despite important caveats), although these reassignments may reduce achievement for students from higher-income backgrounds.

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