In 2016, the North Carolina legislature implemented the North Carolina Fixed Tuition Program. This policy ensures that, once enrolled, an undergraduate student's tuition rate at any of the state's four-year public colleges will not increase for eight consecutive semesters of enrollment. While touted as an effort to increase affordability by…

How have changes in the price of enrolling full time at public 2- and 4-year colleges affected student decisions about whether and where to enroll in college? Using local differences in the growth of tuition at community colleges and public 4-year colleges, we study the impact of public higher education tuition prices on the post-secondary…

Higher education has increasingly been called upon to develop interdisciplinary programs -- particularly in STEM fields -- that prepare students to address multi-faceted, real world problems. While the tensions between disciplinary cultures and interdisciplinary programs have been previously studied, relatively little is known about the…

Performance-funding for higher education diffused across the U.S. following the Great Recession that led to funding cuts for the system. Postsecondary funding never returned to pre-Recession levels, and public colleges are held to higher expectations even as the funding they might use to meet these expectations has diminished. This is a challenge…

States have adopted a variety of policies to encourage universities to expand research production, with the hope of supporting economic growth and competitiveness. This paper considers whether a state-level initiative succeeded in influencing university-based research outputs among regional public universities. We test whether the Texas Research…

Using data from four waves of the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS) in 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016, this study examines the effect of the PGIB on veterans' student loans. Results indicate that the PGIB has significantly affected veteran students' borrowing behavior, with an average $1,100 reduction in Stafford Loans. Veteran students…

Using ongoing interviews and focus groups, this longitudinal study examines perceptions of eight students entering a state-serving, public university about the role of social class in identifying symbolic boundaries in different layers of the environment (e.g., from small group to school-wide) in the transition from high school to college.…

In this study, we interrogated the efforts adopted by community and technical colleges in a Midwestern state to address racial inequities since the onset of COVID-19. We analyzed such efforts reported in institutional newsletters and associated media through critical content analysis supported by text mining techniques. Our findings demonstrate a…

Given racial inequality in the United States is grounded in policies and practices that have historically governed where People of Color live, where colleges go and do not go to recruit prospective students may be an important source of racial inequality in college access. This study examines the spatial distribution of out-of-state recruiting…

Grounding our work in shared commitments to community care, our collective of racially minoritized higher education scholars aims to resist the often overly competitive and isolating nature of research teams in graduate education. Our commitments to community care are also in opposition to a hyperfocus on productivity as a measure of success in…

Conceptualizing and measuring trends in segregation in higher education is difficult as both vertical and horizontal sorting is prevalent and patterns vary across racial groups. In this paper, we measure various trends in racial segregation in California for 20 years. We find significant sorting by race both between and within sectors of higher…

The trend toward continuous expansion of U.S. post-secondary enrollments was reversed in the 2010s. Using pooled state-level data in between-within models, we examine public higher education enrollment trends during the 2009-2019 period. We emphasize variation in the net associations of covariates by tiers. State economic conditions showed…

Responsibility center management (RCM) budgeting systems devolve budget responsibility while creating funding formulas that provide incentives for academic units to generate revenues and decrease costs. A growing number of public universities have adopted RCM. The desire to grow tuition revenue has often been cited as a rationale for adoption.…

Despite occupying a central position in contemporary U.S. higher education discourse, empirical research on administrative costs is limited. The purpose of this study was to extend existing research on administrative spending in higher education by empirically examining whether recently shifting to research university status in the Carnegie…

Despite the robust literature on the effects of financial aid, the effects of financial aid loss remain largely understudied. We employ a regression discontinuity design, leveraging a minimum GPA scholarship renewal threshold, to examine the effect of losing state merit aid eligibility on college student stop-out, transfer, and bachelor's degree…