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 […]
Revisiting California Proposition 209: Changes in Science Persistence Rates and Overall Graduation Rates
by Anh-Huy Nguyen Abstract California Proposition 209 outlawed race-based affirmative action in the University of California (UC) system in 1998. However, the UC system subsequently shifted towards race-blind affirmative action by also reweighing factors other than race in the admissions process. To evaluate the hypothetical changes in the science persistence rate and graduation rate of […]
The Impact of Collegiate Athletic Success and Scandals on Admissions Applications
By William J. Battle-McDonald This paper examines how the quantity and quality of admissions applications to Division 1 colleges and universities were affected by two non-academic factors: (1) performance of a school’s men’s basketball and football teams; and (2) scandals associated with these athletic programs. Admissions data from 2001 – 2017 were compared to team […]
Analyzing Student and Family-Level Effects on a Family’s Contributions to Fund a College Education
By Justin T. Rosenblum and John H. Zipf We investigate the efficiency of the current financial aid system for prospective college students. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form reviews a family’s financial information and universities review a student’s academic prowess, but neither fully examines students and their family’s qualitative factors such as […]
The Impact of Greek Affiliation on Grades and Course Selection
By Andrew De Donato We seek to understand how affiliating with a Greek organization impacts both grades and course selection. This research provides a novel addition to the literature due to a unique situation at the sample university, in that the first opportunity for freshmen to join Greek organizations occurs in the spring semester rather […]
Federal and Industrial Funded Research Expenditures and University Technology Transfer licensing
By Trent Chiang In this paper I relate the numbers of university licenses and options to both university research characteristics and research expenditures from federal government or industrial sources. I apply the polynomial distributed lag model for unbalanced panel data to understand the effects of research expenditures from different sources on licensing activity. We find […]
An Empirical Study of the Anticommons Effect on Public vs. Private Researchers
by Serena S. Lam Abstract The “anticommons effect” is a recently coined term to describe the phenomenon of stifled research and innovation in the biomedical research arena due to the growing number of overlapping patents in particular domains. Murray and Stern (2005) was the first to devise a novel strategy to quantify this effect by […]
