Post-secondary education
The Impacts and Experiences of Corequisite Remediation for Latinx Students
Colleges across the United States are now placing most or all students directly into college-level courses and providing supplementary, aligned academic support alongside the courses, also known as “corequisite remediation.” Developmental education reforms like corequisite remediation could… more →
College-Major Choice to College-then-Major Choice: The Heterogeneous Impacts of Late Specification Reforms on College Student Composition
This paper provides one of the first natural experimental evidence on the consequences of a transition from college-major (early specialization) to college-then-major (late specialization) choice mechanism. Specifically, we study a recent reform in China that allows college applicants to apply… more →
College-Major Choice to College-then-Major Choice: Experimental Evidence from Chinese College Admissions Reforms
One of the most important mechanism design policies in college admissions is to let students choose a college major sequentially (college-then-major choice) or jointly (college-major choice). In the context of the Chinese meta-major reforms that transition from college-major choice to college-… more →
“I Don’t Think the System Will Ever Be the Same”: Distance Education Leaders’ Predictions and Recommendations for the Use of Online Learning in Community Colleges Post-COVID
While the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the short-term use of online courses, colleges’ experiences with COVID-era online course delivery may also affect the way that they offer and approach online courses going forward. We draw on interviews with 35 distance education leaders from the… more →
Who’s Matched Up? Access to Same-Race Instructors in Higher Education
Despite consistent evidence on the benefits of same-race instructor matching in K-12 settings and developing work in higher education, research has yet to conceptualize and document the incidence of same-race matching. That is, even if same-race matching produces positive effects, how likely are… more →
Underrepresented Minority Students in College: The Role of Classmates
The role of racial diversity at college campuses has been debated for over a half a century with limited quasi-experimental evidence from classrooms. To fill this void, I estimate the extent that classmate racial compositions affect Hispanic and African-American students at a large and over-… more →
Assessing Atlanta’s Placed-Based College Scholarship
We investigate whether and how Achieve Atlanta’s college scholarship and associated services impact college enrollment, persistence, and graduation among Atlanta Public School graduates experiencing low household income. Qualifying for the scholarship of up to $5,000/year does not… more →
Variation in broadband access among undergraduate populations across the United States
Increasing numbers of students require internet access to pursue their undergraduate degrees, yet broadband access remains inequitable across student populations. Furthermore, surveys that currently show differences in access by student demographics or location typically do so at high levels of… more →
Opening the Black Box of College Major Choice: Evidence from an Information Intervention
We study the importance of job-related and non-job-related factors in students’ college major choices. Using a staggered intervention that allows us to provide students information about many different aspects of majors and to compare the magnitudes of the effects of each piece of information,… more →
Mandating Multiple Measures and Encouraging Student Supports: Evaluating a New Approach to Developmental Education in California’s Community Colleges
AB705 is a landmark higher education policy that has changed approaches to developmental/remedial education in the California Community College system. We study one district that implemented reforms by placing most students in transfer-level math/English courses and encouraging enrollment in… more →
Are Students Time Constrained? Course Load, GPA, and Failing
Given the simultaneous rise in time-to-graduation and college GPA, it may be that students reduce their course load to improve their performance. Yet, evidence to date only shows increased course loads increase GPA. We provide a mathematical model showing many unobservable factors -- beyond… more →
Is Big Data Better? LMS Data and Predictive Analytic Performance in Postsecondary Education
Colleges have increasingly turned to data science applications to improve student outcomes. One prominent application is to predict students’ risk of failing a course. In this paper, we investigate whether incorporating data from learning management systems (LMS)--which captures detailed… more →
Not the Great Equalizer? Local Economic Mobility and Inequality Effects for the Establishment of U.S. Universities
We exploit historical natural experiments to test whether universities increase economic mobility and equality. We use "runner-up’" counties that were strongly considered to become university sites but were not selected for as-good-as-random reasons as counterfactuals for university counties.… more →
Heterogeneity in Labor Market Returns to Master’s Degrees: Evidence from Ohio
Graduate education is among the fastest growing segments of the U.S. higher educational system. This paper provides up-to-date causal evidence on labor market returns to Master’s degrees and examines heterogeneity in the returns by field area, student demographics and initial labor market… more →
Do STEM Students Vote?
For decades, pundits, politicians, college administrators, and academics have lamented the dismal rates of civic engagement among students who enroll in courses and eventually major in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (i.e., STEM) fields. However, the research supporting this… more →
Keep Me In, Coach: The Short- and Long-Term Effects of Targeted Academic Coaching
To boost college graduation rates, policymakers often advocate for academic supports such as coaching or mentoring. Proactive and intensive coaching interventions are effective, but are costly and difficult to scale. We evaluate a relatively lower-cost group coaching program targeted at first-… more →
Can the promise of free education improve college attainment? Lessons from the Milwaukee Area Technical College Promise
This study found that the MATC Promise increased college attainment by encouraging Milwaukee high school students to access state and federal aid, and to consider matriculating to their local two-year college. The MATC Promise exemplifies the last-dollar model of college aid. If seniors at… more →
Student Selection into an Income Share Agreement
Financing college expenses through an income share agreement (ISA) is an arrangement where the student agrees to pay a fixed percentage of future earned income for a designated period of time in exchange for college funding. Using administrative and survey data for all eligible applicants to a… more →
College Field Specialization and Beliefs about Relative Performance: An Experimental Intervention to Understand Gender Gaps in STEM
Beliefs about relative academic performance may shape field specialization and explain gender gaps in STEM enrollment, but little causal evidence exists. To test whether these beliefs are malleable and salient enough to change behavior, I run a randomized controlled trial with 5,700… more →
The Impact of COVID-19 on Community College Enrollment and Student Success: Evidence from California Administrative Data
This paper examines how the pandemic impacted the enrollment patterns, fields of study, and academic outcomes of students in the California Community College System, the largest higher-education system in the country. Enrollment dropped precipitously during the pandemic – the total number of… more →