New Jersey, like many states, has long struggled with the tension of maintaining a well-funded public education system while not overburdening residents with high property taxes. New Jersey's school funding formula, 2008's School Funding Reform Act (SFRA), includes a determination of how much local funding -- raised through property taxes -- is…

Academic advising is regarded as an important student support practice that impacts college students' academic retention and graduation (Habley, 2009; Holland et al., 2020; Kuhn, 2008, Mayhew et al., 2016). However, research examining the use of academic advising services revealed that, as a demographic group, Black male undergraduate students are…

Objective: Characterize the prevalence and dimensions of student food insecurity and the associations with academic performance. Participants: An online survey was distributed (November 2017) to 13,897 undergraduates at a midsized, New Jersey Public University; 2,055 (15%) responded. Methods: Demographic, behavioral, and food security data from…

Nursing educators are challenged to find strategies that will develop critical thinking and clinical judgment abilities in students. As technology has advanced, the use of virtual simulation platforms has increased in use in nursing courses. This study examined the effect of a pilot virtual simulation intervention on critical thinking and clinical…

Perceptions of student-teacher relationship quality have been shown to directly impact student achievement and the long-term career success of teachers. Students who perceive supportive relationships with teachers show increased school attendance, higher graduation rates, and more engagement in school. Moreover, teachers who perceive greater…

Camden City School District is committed to identifying and serving students experiencing homelessness to ensure they receive a free, appropriate public education. This report provides new statistics for the 2020-21 school year, which includes the shift to remote learning. We also consider differences in educational indicators (e.g., attendance,…

The Asian American population is expected to grow to 46 million by the year 2060. Historically seen as a monolithic group, there are more than twenty subsets that make up the Asian-American demographic. The five Chinese and five Indian participants in this study belong to the top two Asian-American origin groups. This exploratory mixed-methods…

Scholarship on college choice largely focuses on how students search for colleges but less is known about how colleges recruit students. This article analyzes off-campus recruiting visits for 15 public research universities. We Web-scrape university admissions websites and issue public records requests to collect data on recruiting visits.…

America is a very diverse country, with over 40% of the population identifying as people of color, and the proportion of public school students of color rising to 55% by the year 2027. Although the face of students in schools has changed, the ethnic composition of the educators has not. These race/ethnicity differences between school staff and…

To understand the use of early care and education (ECE) programs in New Jersey, the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) conducted a representative survey of parents of children under age 5 (not yet in kindergarten) about their use of (non-parental) child care. The survey was conducted between May 25th and June 13rd, 2022, with…

This dissertation is intended to add to what practitioners and researchers know about factors that affect a high school's postsecondary enrollment rates. It uses several regression models on a data set of all New Jersey High Schools from the 2012-2018 school years to answer three research questions. These questions were designed to gain an…

This dissertation is comprised of three essays, each examining a different topic in labor economics. In Chapter 1, I examine the productivity and selection effects of K-12 teacher tenure by leveraging variation from New Jersey's TEACHNJ Act. This law extended the pre-tenure period from three to four years and allowed districts to dismiss…

Many young people in Newark, New Jersey, when they cross the invisible line that separates street from school, enter what constitutes for them an alien territory, a place where their values, experiences and their ways of talking and thinking are not acknowledged, respected, or welcomed. At the same time, schools are also one of the few places…

New Jersey's School Funding Reform Act (SFRA) is a "weighted" funding formula, designed to deliver adequate funding based on the unique student needs in every school district across the state. The SFRA included key elements to address long-standing racial and socio-economic disparities in New Jersey's public school system, most notably…

Purpose: This study examines foster care reentry after adoption, in Illinois and New Jersey. The provision of services and supports to adoptive families have garnered recent attention due to concern about the long-term stability of adoptive homes. Method: This study used administrative data to examine the pre-adoption characteristics associated…