Post-secondary education
Do Faculty Affect Student Partisanship?
We study whether Democratic college professors make their students more liberal. We link voter data to salary records from 33 state flagships and show that faculty skew Democratic, especially in the humanities and social sciences. We then use student transcripts from one flagship to estimate… more →
An Applied Researchers’ Guide to Estimating Effects from Blocked Cluster Randomized Trials: Estimands, Estimators, and Estimates
Blocked cluster randomized trials (CRTs) are widely used to evaluate educational interventions. In such trials, researchers face critical choices about how to define and estimate the average treatment effect (ATE). These choices—both the estimand (e.g., person- vs. cluster-weighted) and the… more →
An Analysis of Academic School Spending in Higher Education
Academic schools, such as colleges and their constituent departments within larger universities, are increasingly being expected to increase revenues and reduce expenditures in a challenging financial environment. Yet relatively little is known about schools’ resource allocation decisions. In… more →
Better Together? Female Instructors, Female Advisors, and Women’s Persistence in Economics
Female instructors and female advisors each matter for women’s persistence in economics. We ask whether the two work better together than apart and whether this is specific to women. Using administrative records from a broad-access public university, we combine quasi-random instructor assignment… more →
“A Ragtag Team of Like[-Minded] Individuals Who Are Willing to Help”: The Implementation and Evolution of Student Support Services at Community Colleges with Promise Programs
As promise programs have become increasingly popular at community colleges, these institutions have either created or repurposed student services for their promise students, in addition to covering their tuition and fees. Using a multiple case study design, we interviewed 32 community college… more →
The Role of Course Delivery Modality in Dual Enrollment
Dual enrollment, or college courses offered in high school, can be delivered using a variety of modalities. Conducted in North Carolina, this study uses a statewide dataset to examine participation in and outcomes for three different delivery modalities for general academic courses and Career… more →
The Labor Market Value of Community College Bachelor’s Degrees: Initial Evidence from a Resume Audit Study in Early Childhood Education
Community colleges are more financially, academically, and geographically accessible than four-year colleges. Despite most community college students intending to earn a bachelor’s degree, few transfer to a four-year institution and even fewer earn bachelor’s degrees, leading policymakers to… more →
Resegregating the Academy: How Anti-DEI Politics Dismantle Faculty Racial Equity Infrastructure
Since 2021, state legislatures and then the federal government have moved to dismantle programs and offices built over seventy-five years to reduce barriers for racially marginalized people in American higher education—losses largely examined in scholarship and media piecemeal, one policy or… more →
Does Relative Performance Feedback Improve Academic Outcomes? Evidence from a Randomised Controlled Trial in a Spanish University
The effects of relative performance feedback on student achievement remain contested in the economics of education literature. Some studies find that providing students with information about their standing relative to peers improves academic outcomes, while others show negative effects driven… more →
Do Neighbors Shape the Sticker Price? Spatial Competition and State Funding in Cost of Attendance Reporting Over Time
Federal law requires U.S. postsecondary institutions to publish a Cost of Attendance (COA) that serves as the legal ceiling on a student's federal financial aid eligibility, yet off-campus living costs are estimated by institutions at their own discretion, with no standardized methodology or… more →
First Impressions Matter: Instructor Gender and Women’s Persistence in Economics
Using near-random assignment of students to instructors in introductory economics at a broad-access public university, we study how instructor gender affects women’s persistence in economics. Female instructors close roughly 40 percent of the gender gap in advanced economics course-taking, with… more →
Success Begets Success: The Dynamic Treatment Effects of Financial Aid Tournaments
Financial aid programs in higher education vary widely in design, including how aid is structured and the timing of provision. This paper studies the impact of financial aid provided as a repeated tournament and its dynamic treatment effects. Pooling administrative data that captures 32% of all… more →
Meeting People Where They Are: Experimental Evidence on Embedded Supports, Service Use, and Educational Outcomes
Many public services suffer from persistently low take-up despite high potential returns. A growing body of evidence suggests that information alone does little to close this gap; instead, hassle costs and default access points may be binding constraints on utilization. We test whether… more →
Does Coursework Matter? Uncovering the Role of Skills in the Returns to College
The continuing shift of the U.S. economy toward a high-skill base has increased the demand for college-educated workers. To understand how higher education prepares students for this evolving economy, a large body of literature in labor economics has focused on the causes and consequences of… more →
Unequal and Persistent Effects of Student Loan Policy: Evidence from Parent PLUS Reforms
Federal student loan policy is designed as a uniform intervention, yet institutions differ in their reliance on specific sources of financing. We study how these differences shape the transmission of policy shocks using two reforms to the Parent Loans for Undergraduate Students (Parent PLUS)… more →
The Impact of the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard Decision on Undergraduate Demographics
The 2023 Supreme Court decision Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (SFFA) effectively ended the explicit consideration of race in college admissions. This paper examines the impact of SFFA on the racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic composition of undergraduate… more →
Student and Faculty Same-Race Matching at Research Universities
Racial disparities in college persistence and completion remain substantial, yet relatively little evidence exists on how student–faculty interactions contribute to these gaps in research universities. This study examines the prevalence and consequences of student–faculty same-race matching… more →
Supporting Females in STEM: Evidence on Student-Instructor Gender-Matching in 4-Year Research Universities in Texas
Despite progress in overall educational attainment, female students remain underrepresented in STEM fields. One proposed mechanism for improving female students' outcomes is exposure to same-gender faculty, yet evidence on both the prevalence and impacts of student–instructor gender matching in… more →
Understanding the Construction of Compliance with Anti-"DEI" Legislation
Despite documented harms of anti-“DEI” laws, little is known about the mechanisms that shape implementation to give these laws expanded and suppressive meaning. Guided by legal mobilization theory and repressive legalism, we examine how institutional actors implement legislation restricting… more →
Staffing and Resource Allocation in College Access Reform: How Dual Credit Shifts Educational Costs
Objective. Dual credit (DC), or dual enrollment, is college-level coursework that confers credit towards both high school graduation and a postsecondary degree. As DC has grown rapidly across the country, this study provides needed evidence about how these courses shift… more →