Free University? An Investigation of Australia’s 1974 Free Higher Education Policy and Its Impact on Enrollment, Degree Completion, Later-Life Occupational Status, and Income
by Yaxuan “Annie” Cui Abstract To what extent has the free higher education policy of 1974 impacted Australian students’ decisions of university enrollment, degree completion, and later-life human capital development? In this paper, I analyze the impact of the policy from both national descriptive statistics and individual-level enrollment and degree completion decisions using the Australian […]
Student Effort and Parent Attitude on Education Attainment: Evidence from Multi-year Survey in Gansu, China
by Ridge Zhong-yuan Ren Abstract This paper explores whether student effort and parent attitudes have varying effects at different stages of a student’s life in terms of educational attainment and job outcomes. With survey data in Gansu, China, a largely rural province in Northwest China that lags behind the rest of China in education, this […]
An Analysis of the Labor Market Returns to Community College and Vocational Training
by Eli Levine Abstract Education and training are fundamentally linked with labor market performance. There is a significant body of work analyzing the role of education in wages with an emphasis on a comparison between a college degree and a high school diploma. However, as states have begun to shift their education policies to make […]
Peer Effects & Differential Attrition: Evidence from Tennessee’s Project STAR
by Sanjay Satish Abstract This paper explores the effects of attrition on student development in early education. It aims to provide evidence that student departure in elementary schools has educational impacts on the students they leave behind. Utilizing data from Tennessee’s Project STAR experiment, this paper aims to expand upon the literature of peer effects, […]
Predictors of Student Loan Repayments: A Comparison Between Public, Private For-Profit and Private Nonprofit Schools
by Mannat Bakshi and Arjun Ahluwalia Abstract Using a sample of over 3,500 colleges from the College Scorecard Dataset , we investigate the association of average federal student loan repayment rates with institutional, regional, and student demographic characteristics of colleges. We consider educational cohorts from 2010 to 2016 at public, private for-profit, and private non-profit […]
Bridging the Persistence Gap: An Investigation of the Underrepresentation of Female and Minority Students in STEM Fields
By Aaditya Jain and Bailey Kaston Prior literature on mismatch theory has concentrated primarily on minority students, whose lower average levels of pre-enrollment preparedness tend to discourage them from persisting in STEM fields as often as their non-minority counterparts at selective universities. Our study shifts the focus to the persistence gap between men and women, […]
