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…

RAND researchers studied more than 450,000 recipients of New Jersey's Tuition Aid Grant (TAG) -- the nation's most generous state-funded grant program per state resident college student -- to explore whether getting larger amounts of grant aid led to higher graduation rates for students at varying income levels and attending two-year, four-year,…

We examine GPA and timely graduation among Native Hawaiian (NH) students using a unique dataset of bachelor degree recipients from the University of Hawai'i. Our findings indicate that NHs have lower average GPA at graduation and the differences persist across the entire distribution of GPA. More troubling were the larger differences in GPA…

The 3-year graduation rate is a rarely measured metric in higher education compared to its 4- or 6- year graduation rate counterparts. For the first time in college (FTIC) students to graduate in three years, they must come with certain skills, abilities, plans, supports, or motivations. This project considers two distinct but interrelated ways of…

The underrepresentation of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and computer science) has attracted considerable attention, and many have wondered whether women are more likely than men to quit STEM programs at university. Using data from the Education and Labour Market Longitudinal Platform (ELMLP), this study follows…

Doctor of philosophy (PhD) degree holders are highly regarded in Kenya, especially in academia, and the Kenyan economy needs them to undertake administrative, research and innovation roles in academia and industry. However, attaining this qualification is arduous and Kenyan PhD programmes are characterised by low enrolment numbers, long degree…

Purpose: The purpose of this retrospective study is to identify potential predictors of academic success or failure in Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) programmes in the field of biomedicine. Based on these, the policies and structure of academic programmes granting PhD degrees in biomedicine might be improved. Literature review (State of the art): At…

The term dual, or concurrent, enrollment refers to the broad array of programs available to high school students that allow them to take college-level courses for credit. Dual enrollment creates multiple pathways to college by enabling high school students to take: (1) selected academic courses on college campuses; (2) college-led academic courses…

One way administrators and policy makers have responded to the complexity of the community college transfer process has been to create articulation agreements between two-year and four-year colleges in a state or region. Our study examines the effects of one such statewide articulation and transfer policy, the Ohio transfer module (TM). This…

Income gaps in college enrollment, persistence, and graduation raise concerns for those interested in equal opportunity in higher education. We present findings from a randomly assigned scholarship for low-income students at a medium-sized public 4-year university. The program focused solely on the first four semesters of enrollment and tied aid…

The C4 Scholar program (Cross-Curricular Career Community) is a multi-semester, interdisciplinary learning community program at a comprehensive Midwestern university for underprepared students entering with three developmental placements in English composition, mathematics, and reading. The program, which includes course acceleration and…

Contrary to the overall tendency to increase student participation in the financing of higher education, Estonia abolished student tuition fees in 2013. We study the effects of this reform on the students' access to and progress in higher education, concentrating mostly on the changes in probabilities of rural and remote students being admitted…

There is a critical need to develop new educational technology applications that analyze the data collected by universities to ensure that students graduate in a timely fashion (4 to 6 years); and they are well prepared for jobs in their respective fields of study. In this paper, we present a novel approach for analyzing historical educational…

Objectives/Research Question: This study aims to explore who transfers between 2-year colleges (lateral transfer students) and how these students fare in terms of degree attainment. More specifically, this research explores two research questions: (1) What are the predictors of lateral transfer? (2) Is lateral transfer associated with degree…