The Pell Grant is targeted to students with the greatest financial need, and many policymakers find the Pell Grant a useful policy lever for promoting access and success for students from lower- and moderate-income backgrounds. There are several examples where policymakers use Pell eligibility to allocate resources and hold colleges accountable…

The long-term financial viability of private higher education has been a topic of concern for some time, with experts predicting their decline. This concern has been exacerbated by declining enrollment, mounting deficits, and a wave of closures among small private institutions. Demographic changes, including declining high school graduate…

This dissertation studies the market for higher education and impacts of higher education policy on the market. In the first chapter, I estimate the short-run elasticity of supply of higher education using the rollout of state merit grant programs as plausibly exogenous variation in student demand for in-state higher education. I find that public…

As populist forces stretch apart higher education and government, colleges lobby in measurable ways to secure scarce funding and respond to accountability regulations. The non-profit and corporate lobbying literature provides a basis of comparison to ask if colleges lobby like corporations, which have been successful lobbyists under challenging…

The unique tension caused by the interdependent relationship between access, affordability, and sustainability adds an additional level of complexity for administrators in balancing societal educational needs, economic realities, and institutional success. Trends suggest postsecondary six-year degree completion remains stagnant despite most full…

This study investigated the relationship between institutional graduation rates of students with Pell grants and institutional/financial aid characteristics. Study findings suggest that increasing the proportion of Pell recipients was related to a decrease in Pell student graduation rates, while increasing institutional grants was associated with…

This Data Point uses data from the 2016/17 Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B:16/17). The study is a national survey of students who earned a bachelor's degree during the 2015-16 academic year. Students are surveyed at different time points to study change. The second collection was done in 2017, about 1 year after respondents…

Congress has legislation before it to increase the maximum Pell Grant by $550 for low-income students. But students would not be allowed to use the extra Pell dollars at for-profit colleges and universities. This has the for-profit higher education industry claiming discrimination against them in their lobbying campaign insisting that any federal…

Efforts are underway by the Senate education committee to reauthorize the Higher Education Act. Lawmakers are focused on establishing a state-federal partnership program to increase investments in higher education, providing more information to students and their families so they can make informed choices about where to go to college, and…

In recent decades, several dozen colleges and universities have instituted loan-reduction initiatives (LRIs), such as "no-loan" programs. Institutions frequently cast such initiatives as efforts to increase socioeconomic diversity on campus. Using a difference-in-differences analytic strategy with national institution-level data, we…

In response to goals of expanding access as well as public pressure to leverage substantial endowment resources toward increasing affordability, numerous elite colleges have enacted policies aimed at improving access and affordability by replacing student loans with grants in financial aid packages. No-loan policies, however, differ in the extent…

At a time when Wisconsin faces severe workforce shortages in several key sectors and demand for skilled workers has skyrocketed, enrollment in the state's colleges and universities has generally been declining even faster than the national trend. Enrollments in Wisconsin across all public and private institutions were falling even prior to the…

This is the executive summary for the report, "A Little Help: Is Financial Aid Keeping College Affordable in Wisconsin?" This study finds that Wisconsin has not prioritized financial aid programs in recent years despite their potential benefits to the workforce and students, particularly low-income students and those of color. State…

This study uses data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System and Delta Cost Project to identify institutional predictors of bachelor's degree completion rates for Pell Grant recipients and nonrecipients at public and private not-for-profit 4-year institutions. Descriptive analyses show that Pell recipients are relatively…

Supporting bachelor's degree completion for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds has been a focus for a number of selective four-year colleges and universities. Bachelor's degree completion rates for recipients of federal Pell Grant funds have been reported by the National Center for Education Statistics for a decade. Statistical data…