This qualitative pilot study introduces and reflects on early development and implementation of the Zero Fee Tuition (ZFT) program in the rural, oil and gas town of Drayton Valley, Alberta, Canada. This innovative, primarily municipally funded program, implemented in 2019, provides local students with up to $5,000 in free tuition for select…

Private nonprofit colleges are increasingly using tuition resets, or a decrease in sticker price by at least 5%, to attract new students and counter declining demand. While discounting tuition with institutional aid is a common practice to get accepted students to matriculate and to increase affordability, a tuition reset is a more transparent…

Pell eligibility for incarcerated people is a great rehabilitative opportunity, but several challenges remain. This article recaps five of the issues identified by the original research articles in this special issue. It also considers how solutions proposed in these studies may be beneficial across a variety of these issues and gathers…

Promise programs are an increasing popular solution to improving college affordability, reducing educational inequities, and promoting economic development. Promise programs are distinct from other forms of financial aid because they emphasize residency in their eligibility criteria, where students must live and/or attend school in specific…

As in other nations, higher education has many benefits for individual participants and for communities in the United States. But, the opportunity to attain higher education is unequal. To understand the forces that contribute to higher education attainment in the United States, this essay first provides a brief overview of the characteristics of…

This paper describes relationships between tuition discounting (TD), net tuition revenue, and other institutional characteristics at four-year, liberal arts institutions. TD, a practice whereby institutional grants are used to subsidize a student's educational expense, has become a common practice at four-year institutions. TDs impact on…

We find evidence of enrollment increases in both Syracuse and Buffalo following the announcement of a placed-based scholarship program, Say Yes to Education. While the Syracuse increases were accompanied by enrollment declines in surrounding suburban districts, the Buffalo increases coincided with declines in private school enrollments. Buffalo…

After the abolition of student maintenance grants in 2016, higher education bursaries will be the major source of non-repayable aid for poor students in England, with £300 m spent per year. The aims of the bursary system were never explicitly laid out by government, making it challenging to evaluate this unique form of aid. In this paper, I…

One way in which financial aid is thought to promote college success is by minimizing the time students spend working. Yet, little research has examined if this intended first-order effect occurs, and results are mixed. We leverage a randomized experiment and find that students from low-income families in Wisconsin offered additional grant aid…

Technology-facilitated interventions following high school graduation have shown promise for increasing the likelihood of college matriculation, but we know little about how to fine-tune these tools. I conducted an experiment in which college-intending Tennessee high school graduates received informational messages in distinct behavioral frames:…

The heightened mobility of resources, ideas, and cultural practices across national borders--commonly known as "globalization"--entails changes in the contexts in which US research universities operate. We draw on recent developments in neo-institutional theory to understand these changes and their implications for the ways in which US…

Federal courts have permitted tax credits for tuition at religious schools. Does a religious mission inhibit a school's ability or willingness to teach civic values, such as tolerance for political and religious differences? This essay examines relevant empirical research to find that religious schools, overall, do no worse than public schools at…

After "Zelman v. Simmons-Harris" (2002), civil conflict over use of vouchers and taxes to purchase private education, especially in religious schools, largely remained an issue for state courts' jurisprudence. However, in 2010, it returned to the U.S. Supreme Court when Arizona taxpayers challenged the constitutionality of the state's…

Georgia's General Assembly passed the 1961 "Tuition Grants Act" as a method for avoiding school desegregation. In 1993, an Atlanta attorney attempted to use the Act to provide private school vouchers. This study compares and contrasts arguments for and against the Act, and public support for the Act, in 1961 and 1993, using Robinson's…

This article explores the determinants of persistence in the Chilean higher education system, considering academic and socio-demographic factors as well as the role of financial aid. The financial aid policy for students in Chile has undergone major changes over the last decade, which has allowed individuals from usually underrepresented income…