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Higher education
Happy Together? The Peer Effects of Dual Enrollment Students on Community College Student Outcomes
Tags: Higher educationNationally, 15% of first-time community college students were high school dual enrollment (DE) students, which raises concerns about how high school peers might influence college enrollees. Using administrative data from a large state community college system, we examine whether being exposed to… more →
Negative Impacts From the Shift to Online Learning During the COVID-19 Crisis: Evidence from a Statewide Community College System
Topics: Student LearningThe COVID-19 pandemic led to an abrupt shift from in-person to virtual instruction in Spring 2020. We use two complementary difference-in differences frameworks, one that leverages within-instructor-by-course variation on whether students started their Spring 2020 courses in person or online and… more →
Examining STEM Performance within a Comprehensive College Transition Program
We examine the impact of the Thompson Scholars Learning Community (TSLC), a comprehensive college transition program serving students with a variety of majors, on students’ science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM)-related outcomes. We use an explanatory mixed-methods design, which… more →
Examining the Relationship between Psychosocial and Academic Outcomes in Higher Education: A Descriptive Analysis
This paper estimates the relationship between students’ psychosocial and academic outcomes during their first three years enrolled at public, four-year institutions. Our sample is comprised of students from low-income backgrounds who applied for a competitive scholarship and enrolled at a four-… more →
Disproportionate Burden: Estimating the Cost of FAFSA Verification for Public Colleges and Universities
Tags: Higher educationVerification is a federally mandated process that requires selected students to further attest that the information reported on their FAFSA is accurate and complete. In this brief, we estimate institutional costs of administrating the FAFSA verification mandate and consider variation in costs by… more →
Taking It to the Limit: Effects of Increased Student Loan Availability on Attainment, Earnings, and Financial Well-Being
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceGrowing reliance on student loans and repayment difficulties have raised concerns of a student debt crisis in the United States. However, little is known about the effects of student borrowing on human capital and long-run financial well-being. We use variation induced by recent expansions in… more →
Incentivizing Equity? The Effects of Performance-Based Funding on Race-Based Gaps in College Completion
Performance-based funding models for higher education, which tie state support for institutions to performance on student outcomes, have proliferated in recent decades. Some states have designed these policies to also address educational attainment gaps by including bonus payments for… more →
How has COVID-19 impacted FAFSA submissions?
COVID has led colleges to brace for potential enrollment declines in the Fall, which would devastate budgets and potentially decrease the likelihood a student ever earns a degree. We take an early look at California’s FAFSA applications up through mid-June, to anticipate how students may be… more →
The data revolution comes to higher education: Identifying students at risk of dropout in Chile
Enrollment in higher education has risen dramatically in Latin America, especially in Chile. Yet graduation and persistence rates remain low. One way to improve graduation and persistence is to use data and analytics to identify students at risk of dropout, target interventions, and evaluate… more →
Do Peers Affect Undergraduates’ Decisions to Switch Majors?
Tags: Higher educationThis study used college dormitory room and social group assignment data to investigate the peer effect on the probability of college students switching their major fields of study. The results revealed strong evidence of peer effects on students’ decisions to switch majors. In particular, the… more →
Conditions under which college students can be responsive to nudging
Tags: Student supports, Higher educationCollege success requires students to engage with their institution academically and administratively. Missteps with required administrative processes can threaten student persistence and success. Through two experimental studies, we assessed the effectiveness of an artificially intelligent text-… more →
The Effects of Early College Opportunities on English Learners
English Learners (ELs) lag behind their peers in postsecondary attainment. As the EL population in the U.S. continues to grow, so does concern over their underrepresentation in higher education. Research shows that Early College High Schools have a significant impact on high school and college… more →
O Brother, Where Start Thou? Sibling Spillovers on College and Major Choice in Four Countries
Adam Altmejd, Andres Barrios-Fernandez, Marin Drlje, Joshua Goodman, Michael Hurwitz, Dejan Kovac, Christine Mulhern, Christopher Neilson, Jonathan Smith.Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions but identifying their causal effects is notoriously difficult. Using admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings’ college options, we present evidence from the United States, Chile… more →
The Economic Impact of Access to Public Four-Year Colleges
We provide the first estimated economic impacts of students’ access to an entire sector of public higher education in the U.S. Approximately half of Georgia high school graduates who enroll in college do so in the state’s public four-year sector, which requires minimum SAT scores for admission.… more →
Best and Brightest? The Impact of Student Visa Restrictiveness on Who Attends College in the US
Recent immigration policies have created massive uncertainty for international students to obtain F-1 visas. Yet, before the COVID-19 pandemic, student visa applicants already faced an approximately 27 percent refusal rate that varies by time and region. Using data on the universe of SAT takers… more →
Decreasing Time to Baccalaureate Degree in the United States
Tags: Higher educationAfter increasing in the 1970s and 1980s, time to bachelor’s degree has declined since the 1990s. We document this fact using data from three nationally representative surveys. We show that this pattern is occurring across school types and for all student types. Using administrative student… more →
Targeted Interventions in High School: Preparing Students for College
This study adds to the currently limited evidence base on the efficacy of interventions targeting non-college-ready high school students by examining the impact of Kentucky’s Targeted Interventions (TI) program. We focus on interventions that students received under TI in the senior year of high… more →
Winners and Losers? The Effect of Gaining and Losing Access to Selective Colleges on Education and Labor Market Outcomes
Selective college admissions are fundamentally a question of tradeoffs: Given capacity, admitting one student means rejecting another. Research to date has generally estimated average effects of college selectivity, and has been unable to distinguish between the effects on students gaining… more →
Proactive student support using artificially intelligent conversational chatbots: The importance of targeting the technology
We examine through a field experiment whether outreach and support provided through an AI-enabled chatbot can reduce summer melt and improve first-year college enrollment at a four-year university and at a community college. At the four-year college, the chatbot increased overall success with… more →
Identifying Preferences for Equal College Access, Income, and Income Equality
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceRevealed preferences for equal college access may be due to beliefs that equal access increases societal income or income equality. To isolate preferences for those goods, we implement an online discrete choice experiment using social statistics generated from true variation among commuting… more →