This article exploits a natural experiment to estimate the effects of need-based aid policies on first-year college persistence rates. In fall 2006, Ohio abruptly adopted a new state financial aid policy that was significantly more generous than the previous plan. Using student-level data and very narrowly defined sets of students, I estimate a…

In January 1998, the Montgomery County (Ohio) commissioners created the Montgomery County Out-of-School Youth Task Force to identify why 22% of high school students were dropping out. The task force concluded the dropout epidemic was having devastating effects on the local economy. In addition to the obvious problem of local employers having…

Great strides have been made by community school initiatives across the nation in their efforts to impact student achievement, attendance, student engagement, graduation rates, parent involvement and more. Data on community schools is growing and the authors encourage readers to review research reports and syntheses on results. The results…

Those educators who work with academically high-achieving college students have long known that these individuals face challenges along with their less scholastically prepared peers. Recently, the author and her colleagues at Miami University were reminded of this fact when they discovered that 80 percent of their honors students were exiting the…