Post-secondary education
Digital redlining: the relevance of 20th century housing policy to 21st century broadband access and education
Broadband is not equally accessible among students despite its increasing importance to education. We investigate the relationship between broadband and housing policy by joining two measures of broadband access with Depression-era redlining maps that classified neighborhoods based in part on… more →
Experimental Evidence on the Robustness of Coaching Supports in Teacher Education
Many novice teachers learn to teach “on-the-job,” leading to burnout and attrition among teachers and negative outcomes for students in the long term. Pre-service teacher education is tasked with optimizing teacher readiness, but there is a lack of causal evidence regarding effective ways for… more →
Public Higher Education Costs and College Enrollment
How have changes in the costs of enrolling for full-time study at public 2-year and 4-year colleges have affected the decisions about whether and where to enroll in college? We exploit local differences in the growth of tuition at community colleges and public 4-year colleges to study the impact… more →
Teacher Preparation Programs and Graduates' Growth in Instructional Effectiveness
Many prior studies have examined whether there are average differences in levels of teaching effectiveness among graduates from different teacher preparation programs (TPPs); other studies have investigated which features of preparation predict graduates’ average levels of teaching effectiveness… more →
Higher Education and Local Educational Attainment: Evidence from the Establishment of U.S. Colleges
We investigate how the presence of a college affects local educational attainment using historical natural experiments in which "runner-up" locations were strongly considered to become college sites but ultimately not chosen for as-good-as-random reasons. While runner-up counties have since had… more →
How Does the Elimination of State Aid to For-Profit Colleges Affect Enrollment? Evidence from California's Reforms
This paper examines how financial aid reform based on postsecondary institutional performance impacts student choice. Federal and state regulations often reflect concerns about the private, for-profit sector's poor employment outcomes and high loan defaults, despite the sector's possible… more →
Bringing Transparency to Predictive Analytics: A Systematic Comparison of Predictive Modeling Methods in Higher Education
Colleges have increasingly turned to predictive analytics to target at-risk students for additional support. Most of the predictive analytic applications in higher education are proprietary, with private companies offering little transparency about their underlying models.
College Entrance Exam-Taking Strategies in Georgia
Using administrative data from Georgia, we provide the first study of the full set of college entrance exam-taking strategies, including who takes the ACT and the SAT (or both), when they take the exams, and how many times they take each exam. We have several main findings. First, one-third of… more →
Skills, Degrees and Labor Market Inequality
Over the past four decades, income inequality grew significantly between workers with bachelor’s degrees and those with high school diplomas (often called “unskilled”). Rather than being unskilled, we argue that these workers are STARs because they are skilled through alternative routes—namely… more →
Increasing success in higher education: The relationships of online course taking with college completion and time-to-degree
Online courses provide flexible learning opportunities, but research suggests that students may learn less and persist at lower rates compared to face-to-face settings. However, few research studies have investigated more distal effects of online education. In this study we analyzed six years of… more →
College Enrollment and Mandatory FAFSA Applications: Evidence from Louisiana
Barriers to accessing financial aid may keep students from matriculating to college. To test whether FAFSA completion is one of these barriers, I utilize a natural experiment brought about by a Louisiana mandate for seniors to file the FAFSA upon graduation from high school. Exploiting pre-… more →
Labor Market Signaling and the Value of College: Evidence from Resumes and the Truth
How do college non-completers list schooling on their resumes? The negative signal of not completing might outweigh the positive signal of attending but not persisting. If so, job-seekers might hide non-completed schooling on their resumes. To test this we match resumes from an online jobs board… more →
Is a Name Change a Game Change? The Impact of College-to-University Conversions
In the competitive U.S. higher education market, institutions differentiate themselves to attract both students and tuition dollars. One understudied example of this differentiation is the increasing trend of "colleges" becoming "universities" by changing their names. Leveraging variation in the… more →
The Impact of International Students on US Colleges: Higher Education as a Service Export
Between 2005 and 2016, international enrollment in US higher education nearly doubled. I examine how trade shocks in education affect public universities' decision-making. I construct a shift-share instrument to exploit institutions' historical networks with different origins of international… more →
Effects of Perceived Productivity on Study Effort: Evidence from a Field Experiment
How does the perceived relationship between effort and achievement affect effort? To answer this question, I conduct a field experiment with a popular online learning platform. I exogenously manipulate students’ beliefs about returns to effort by assigning them to different information… more →
For‐Profit Colleges in the United States: Insights from Two Decades of Research
In this paper, I review the economics literature on for-profit college education in the United States, assessing what we know about institutional behavior and student outcomes after two decades of research. The many studies reviewed here reveal some consistent patterns. It is clear that for-… more →
Heterogeneous Major Preference for Extrinsic Incentives: The Effects of Wage Information on the Gender Gap in STEM Major Choice
Despite the growing evidence of informational interventions on college and major choices, we know little about how such light-touch interventions affect the gender gap in STEM majors. Linking survey data to administrative records of Chinese college applicants, we conducted a large-scale… more →
Minority Student and Teaching Assistant Interactions in STEM
Graduate student teaching assistants from underrepresented groups may provide salient role models and enhanced instruction to minority students in STEM fields. We explore minority student-TA interactions in an important course in the sciences and STEM – introductory chemistry labs – at a large… more →
Making College Affordable? The Impacts of Tuition Freezes and Caps
Many state governments impose tuition regulations on universities in pursuit of college affordability. How effective are these regulations? We study how universities' "sticker price'' and institutional financial aid change during and after tuition caps and freezes by leveraging temporal and… more →
The Impact of COVID-19 on Community College Enrollment and Student Success: Evidence from California Administrative Data
Enrollment increased slightly at both the California State University and University of California systems in fall 2020, but the effects of the pandemic on enrollment in the California Community College system are mostly unknown and might differ substantially from the effects on 4-year colleges… more →