Greater educational attainment is associated with an increase in expected income, lowering of internal discount rates, and improved financial and health literacy. Income transfers have the potential to positively impact educational attainment by either reducing the direct cost of college attendance or by an inducing an income effect that nudges…

In this dissertation, I study some of the factors that determine schooling decisions in middle-income economies in Latin America. In the first chapter, I examine the impacts of a large-scale program in Colombia that installs water treatment facilities in rural schools. To identify causal effects on student and community outcomes, I leverage…

The purpose of this quantitative study is to investigate the funding equitably across community college districts in Michigan. Pursuant to this investigation, the disproportionate effect that community college funding has on underserved populations was examined. This research utilized a quantitative approach, including descriptive statistics,…

The Uniformed Services University (USU) created the Enlisted to Medical Degree Preparatory Program (EMDP2) in 2014 with the goal of diversifying their student body. The primary purpose of this study was to determine whether certain independent variables (gender, age, race/ethnicity, underrepresented in medicine (URM) status, years of military…

The process of strategically planning enrollment in higher education, particularly at private institutions has seen tremendous changes in a short period of time. Changes in perspectives toward the value of a college degree, along with economic and social factors, have contributed to the difficulty of discovering relationships affecting enrollment.…

Two major assumptions have dominated much of the discourse on Islamic schools in Pakistan since the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s and following the US attack on Afghanistan in October 2001. First, the Pakistani state-run education system is failing. Because of the poor quality of education at public schools, parents choose to send their…

The purpose of this study was to find out if the demographic variables of country of origin, generation in the United States (immigration status), income and parental education had an impact on the financial aid packages of Hispanic undergraduate students. This dissertation asked: What is the relation between generation in the United States,…

The driving force behind the recent increase in financial aid for college education is the rapid growth of state merit-based grant programs that provide scholarships to students who meet predefined standards of academic preparation at the state level, and this trend represents one of the most pronounced policy shifts away from a long tradition of…