Educational leaders stretch pennies, often in futile attempts, to provide equitable educational opportunities for all students. An educated populous, or lack thereof, heavily impacts not only students, but also local, state, and national economies, job markets, and public safety. Knowing where to exert public school fiscal effort to reduce…

This mixed methods dissertation investigates the impact that cost-disaggregating tools like the Delaware Cost Study (DCS) have on the expenditure patterns at large, public research universities. It draws on public budgeting and higher education finance literature to form a theory of action that hypothesizes that expense management at such…

Institutions of higher education have increasingly needed to balance college affordability with their own financial sustainability. There is a growing need for financial innovation and few examples within higher education for adoption of innovation frameworks. This qualitative dissertation examines phases of adoption of income share agreements…

This study examines three key areas where economic policy intersects with development: the influence of international student enrollments on the academic major choices of domestic students in the U.S., the effects of high-speed railroad infrastructure on employment in China, and the influence of monetary policy on housing prices in China. Each…

Within special education, funding is traditionally input-based, providing equitable resources to meet perceived student needs. However, as state and federal governments place an increasing emphasis on academic outcomes, I examine how special education funding has responded. Applying the values in tension model, I address a fundamental problem in…

Teacher attrition has been an issue that has burdened school leaders for decades. The rate at which teachers leave schools is costly and has a negative impact on student achievement. The current study examined the costs associated with teacher attrition and the impact on student achievement. In this mixed methods study, both quantitative and…

The practice of enrollment management at America's colleges and universities is central to prominent discussions taking place in the public arena about the cost of higher education, the value of a degree, and the role of student loans as tools to finance a college education. While research has explored many variables within the context of using…

This thesis studies four independent resource allocation problems with different assumptions on information available to the central planner, and strategic considerations of the agents present in the system. We start off with an online, non-strategic agents setting in Chapter 1, where we study the dynamic pricing and learning problem under the…

This dissertation presents evidence about implementing a free college policy on higher education's demand and supply. This analysis includes descriptive evidence about the impact of the policy on students and programs' behavior. It also develops and estimates a demand and supply model of higher education that provides a framework to analyze the…

This study examines the effect of responsibility center management (RCM), a decentralized budget model, on total operating costs at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) and the University of Arizona (UofA). Both universities in the study implemented RCM with the primary goal of controlling costs, among other goals. To address the research…

Higher education enrollment and degree attainment rates have increased in the U.S. Yet higher education has remained inaccessible to many. Low- and middle-income students and students from particular racial and ethnic backgrounds enroll and attain degrees at lower rates than their peers. To gain insight into the topic of access to higher…

Private colleges have grown accustomed to increasing tuition and fees to meet their expenses. These policies have contributed to the increased college cost for Americans. Most American students and parents have believed that the higher education improved their life by offering better job opportunities, higher salaries and thus a better standard of…

Financial challenges are a major concern for school leaders, a concern that was particularly pronounced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Increased academic expectations, insufficient funding, and rising mandated expenses in the face of declining enrollment constrain budgets and put pressure on student programming. In this environment, collaboration…

In this series of essays, merged institutional and community-representative datasets are analyzed to explore interstate variability in community college expenditure and revenue, education production, and the cost of community college completions. Evidence is presented that factors, such as socioeconomic variables, instructor inputs, size and…

As the cost of higher education has risen, partly due to the embrace of neoliberalism in higher education, students and families have faced a growing cost-sharing burden. Along with an increased demand for graduate education credentials, this trend has led to the growth of student loan debt in the United States. This narrative case study…