Higher Education is facing an increasingly competitive marketplace with high tuition prices, consumers are pushing back on rising tuition prices and choosing community and state colleges. A shortage in the traditional college age student population, has compounded the enrollment problem at small, private colleges. Most private colleges are…

We replicate and extend prior work on Florida's Bright Futures merit aid scholarship to consider its effect on college enrollment and degree completion. We estimate causal impacts using a regression discontinuity design to exploit SAT thresholds that strongly determine eligibility. We find no positive impacts on attendance or attainment, and…

Becoming HOPEless in the 2-year sector addresses the question: "what happens when a state-wide policy removes merit-based financial aid from low-income students making satisfactory academic progress?" To assess the magnitude of this HOPEless effect, we compared credits attempted, attained, and persistence and graduation indicators of…

The notion of merit-aid is not a new development in higher education. Although previous researchers have demonstrated the impact of state-adopted merit-aid funding on student decision-making, fewer studies have examined institutional pricing responses to broad-based merit-aid policies. Using a generalized difference-in-difference approach, we…

Financial aid from the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation (STBF) provides exceptionally generous support to a college population similar to that served by a host of state aid programs. In conjunction with STBF, we randomly assigned aid awards to thousands of Nebraska high school graduates from low-income, minority, and first-generation college…

The Tuition Opportunity Program for Students (subsequently renamed the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students, also known as TOPS), Louisiana's merit-based student aid program, was created via Act 1375 of the 1997 Regular Legislative Session. The first freshman class to receive TOPS awards entered postsecondary education in the fall of 1998. Act…

We replicate and extend prior work on Florida's Bright Futures merit aid scholarship to consider its effect on college enrollment and degree completion. We estimate causal impacts using a regression discontinuity design to exploit SAT thresholds that strongly determine eligibility. We find no positive impacts on attendance or attainment, and…

The allocation of merit-based awards and need-based aid is important to both universities and students who wish to attend the universities. Current approaches tend to consider only institution-centric objectives (e.g. enrollment, revenue) and neglect student-centric objectives in their formulations of the problem. There is lack of consideration to…

Each year, National Association of State Student Grant and Aid Programs (NASSGAP) completes a survey regarding state-funded expenditures for postsecondary student financial aid. This report, the 50th annual survey, represents data from academic year 2018-19. This report provides data regarding state-funded expenditures for student financial aid…

Background: Promise scholarship programs designed to increase college access and success are proliferating across the country. However, little research has investigated how such programs are implemented or how differences in program design, such as the inclusion of merit requirements, could affect the success of these initiatives. Project/Research…

We provide theory and evidence about how the design of college financial aid programs affects a variety of high school, college, and life outcomes. The evidence comes from an eight-year randomized trial where 2,587 high school ninth graders received a $12,000 merit-based grant offer. During high school, the program increased their college…

In this paper we provide a rigorous review of evaluations of education programmes in developing countries. This review is organised to provide guidance to policy-makers by identifying education interventions that are effective, sometimes effective, and not effective and by presenting some information on the cost effectiveness of different types of…

The COVID-19 pandemic has created and will continue to create uncertainty in all facets of everyday life, exacerbating current challenges -- and generating new ones -- for every sector of the economy, including postsecondary education. As the pandemic continues, postsecondary education faces increasing pressures as concerns about health and…

The creation of the Tennessee Education Lottery Scholarship (TELS) program provides a natural experiment where a difference-in-differences estimation design is employed to isolate how state merit aid funding may lead institutions to change their institutional grant aid. Principal agent and resource dependence theories together establish state and…

This dissertation focuses on microeconomic topics in the fields of public, labor and education. Particularly, this dissertation evaluates state policies in higher education and develops a global measure for job quality. Chapter 1 studies how state merit aid programs affect undergraduate degrees earned in Science, Technology, Engineering and…