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Post-secondary education

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A growing body of research has documented extensive credit loss among transfer students. However, the field lacks theoretically driven and empirically supported frameworks that can guide credit loss research and reforms. We develop and then test a comprehensive framework designed to address this gap using novel administrative credit loss data from Texas. Our results demonstrate how the likelihood of credit loss varies across course characteristics, majors, pretransfer academics, student characteristics, and sending and receiving institutions. Additionally, we are able to disentangle general credit loss from major credit loss and examine how they vary across institutions, majors, and the combination of both. The extensive variation in credit loss among universities in particular underscores the need for future research and reform.

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Although community colleges have served as a gateway to universities for millions of students—disproportionately so for students from populations historically underrepresented in higher education—prior research has demonstrated that the majority of vertical transfer students lose at least some of their pretransfer credits. However, researchers examining how credit loss relates to subsequent college outcomes have been hindered by data limitations. For this study, we drew from the literature on academic momentum and examined the relationship between credit loss, institutional retention, and postsecondary persistence. Our use of novel administrative data from Texas enabled us to disentangle major credit loss from general credit loss and study the contribution of each credit loss type to posttransfer outcomes. Our analyses show that both forms of credit loss are inversely related to institutional retention, but the relationships between credit loss and postsecondary persistence are far less consistent. We found evidence suggesting that major credit loss is more strongly related to both retention and persistence than general credit loss. We did not find evidence that the relationship between credit loss and posttransfer outcomes is moderated by students’ race/ethnicity, economic status, or gender, and we found only limited evidence of moderation by major.

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Short-term certificate (STC) programs at community colleges represent a longstanding policy priority to align accelerated postsecondary credentials with job opportunities in local labor markets. Despite large investments in developing STCs, little evidence exists about where and when STCs are opened and whether community colleges open new programs of study in coordination with labor market trends. Using public workforce and postsecondary data, I examine health and manufacturing STC program openings to understand alignment with labor market activity in related industries. I find that STCs are spatially aligned across labor markets within a state, but not necessarily temporally aligned with county-specific trends. One additional STC per college is associated with labor markets that had 2-3 percentage points more total employment and new hires in related industries. Large launches of clustered STC programs occurred before periods of growth in health employment but declines in manufacturing. Large launches preceded earnings growth of 2-5 percentage points in both sectors.

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There is a large and growing number of non-degree credential offerings between a high school diploma and a bachelor's degree, as well as degree programs beyond a bachelor’s degree. Nevertheless, research on the financial returns to non-degree credentials and degree-granting programs is often narrow and siloed. To fill this gap, we leverage a national sample of individuals across nine MSAs and four industries to examine the relative financial returns to a variety of non-degree credentials and degree programs. Leveraging two-way fixed-effect models, we explore the relationship between completing a credential or degree and earnings premiums. We find that an associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degree follows a similar model of returns in which the number of schooling years is linearly related to proportional earnings premiums. However, students completing sub-baccalaureate certificates and earning non-school credentials appear to get larger financial returns for less time. Additionally, while we noticed subtle differences across degree programs, we noticed substantial differences in non-school credentials: only women experienced a significant earnings premium from a non-degree credential. Finally, in terms of race/ethnicity, students of color often experienced larger economic returns to undergraduate certificates and degree programs.

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Sie Won Kim.

Over the past decade, there has been a significant increase in the number of U.S. institutions offering STEM-eligible degree programs in economics. This paper documents the trends in STEM-degree offerings across degree levels and examines the share of foreign students and other characteristics of institutions that offer STEM-eligible programs. Using a difference-in-differences design, this paper finds that departments with a proportion of foreign students above the sample median are 6 and 9 percentage points more likely to offer a STEM-eligible degree program at the bachelor's and master's levels, respectively, after the STEM designation in 2013. Additionally, the tobit regression results suggest that early adopters of STEM-eligible programs are associated with a higher share of foreign students, private institutions and doctoral and research institutions.

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Students’ postsecondary course-taking is of interest to researchers, yet has been difficult to study at large scale because administrative transcript data are rarely standardized across institutions or state systems. This paper uses machine learning and natural language processing to standardize college transcripts at scale. We demonstrate the approach’s utility by showing how the disciplinary orientation of students’ courses and majors align and diverge at 18 diverse four-year institutions in the College and Beyond II dataset. Our findings complicate narratives that student participation in the liberal arts is in great decline. Both professional and liberal arts majors enroll in a large amount of liberal arts coursework, and in three of the four core liberal arts disciplines, the share of course-taking in those fields is meaningfully higher than the share of majors in those fields. To advance the study of student postsecondary pathways, we release the classification models for public use.

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During the 2015-16 academic year, racial protests swept across college campuses in the U.S. These protests were followed by large university investments in initiatives to promote diversity, which combined with existing diversity dynamics, have helped to shape recent faculty diversity trends. We document diversity trends among faculty in STEM and non-STEM fields since the protests in 2015-16. We find that recent diversity trends are narrowing the gender gap among faculty in STEM and non-STEM fields, but widening racial-ethnic gaps, especially among Black faculty. A large body of prior research suggests these trends will affect students’ college experiences and how they choose majors.

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Inequality in college has both structural and psychological causes; these include the presence of self-defeating beliefs about the potential for growth and belonging. Such beliefs can be addressed through large-scale interventions in the college transition (Walton & Cohen, 2011; Walton et al., 2023) but are hard to measure. In our pre-registered study, we provide the strongest evidence to date that the belief that belonging challenges are common and tend to improve with time (“a process-oriented perspective”), the primary target of social-belonging interventions, is critical. We did so by developing and applying computational language measures to 25,000 essays written during a randomized trial of this intervention across 22 broadly representative US colleges and universities (Walton et al., 2023). We compare the hypothesized mediator to one of simple optimism, which includes positive expectations without recognizing that challenges are common. Examining the active control condition, we find that socially disadvantaged students are, indeed, significantly less likely to express a process-oriented perspective spontaneously, and more likely to express simple optimism. This matters: Students who convey a process-oriented perspective, both in control and treatment conditions, are significantly more likely to complete their first year of college full-time enrolled and have higher first-year GPAs, while simple optimism predicts worse academic progress. The social-belonging intervention helped distribute a process-oriented perspective more equitably, though disparities remained. These computational methods enable the scalable and unobtrusive assessment of subtle student beliefs that help or hinder college success.

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We study the effect of educational attainment on family formation using regression discontinuity designs generated by centralized admissions processes to both secondary and tertiary education in Finland. Admission to further education at either margin does not increase the likelihood that men form families. In contrast, women admitted to further education are more likely to both live with a partner and have children. We then pre-register and test two hypotheses which could explain each set of results using survey data. These suggest that the positive association between men's education and family formation observed in the data is driven by selection. For women, our estimates are consistent with the idea that, as increased returns to social skills shift the burden of child development from schools to parents and particularly mothers, education can make women more attractive as potential partners.

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Dual enrollment (DE) is one of the fastest growing programs that support the high school-to-college transition. Yet, there is limited empirical evidence about its impact on either students’ college application choices or admission outcomes. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity approach on data from two cohorts of ninth-grade students in one anonymous state, we found that taking DE credits increased the likelihood of applying to highly selective in-state four-year institutions. Attempting DE credits also increased the probability of gaining admission to a highly selective in-state four-year college. Heterogeneous analysis further indicates that the gains were extended across Black, Latinx, and white student populations.

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