Pay inequity controversies cut across all disciplines and fields in higher education (Meara et al., 2020; Toutkoushian & Conley, 2005). Despite efforts to reduce the wage gap, gender wage inequities persist and continue to adversely affect women across various sectors (Katzeff, 2019; Schieder & Gould, 2016). Since passing the Equal Pay Act…

Salary compression is defined as an issue of inequity when individuals performing the same job responsibilities (and in the same position) have varying compensation levels (Bereman & Lengnick-Hall, 1994; Homer et al., 2020). It occurs when a new employee is hired at a higher compensation than someone with longer tenure within the organization,…

While higher education has been known as the great equalizer, the racial wealth gap of college graduates is overlooked: Among college-educated households (2013) the median net worth was $359,928 for white households; $250,637 for Asian households; $49,606 for Hispanic households; and $32,780 households for Black households. Although MSIs…

Low-wage compensation for employees has far-reaching adverse implications in the work environment. This qualitative exploratory case study explored the influence of low wage compensation on employee motivation in a higher learning institution in the state of Mississippi. The problem addressed was the impact of low wages on employee motivation in…

This dissertation presents three separate essays. The first two essays explore the gender wage gap and its dynamics in urban China from 1995 to 2018. The first chapter decomposes the gender wage gap based on the observed wage for workers with a precise measure of the hourly wages. The first chapter examines the observed average gender wage gap in…

This qualitative study explores the experiences of mid-level higher education professionals navigating workplace changes post-Coronavirus-19 Pandemic and during the subsequent Great Resignation. The study, framed by the theory of ambiguous loss to interpret the impacts of unresolved losses, underscores the importance of equipping higher education…

In the first chapter titled "Cognitive Ability, Education, and Fertility Risk", I explore the role of cognitive ability in fertility timing. Women in the bottom quartile of the cognitive ability distribution are nine times more likely to have their first child as a teenager. First, I document the differences in age at childbirth by…

This dissertation contains three essays discussing government policy in higher education, the effects of online social networks during college on students after graduating, and how to use search data as a tool to recover characteristics of both products and customers to estimate demand. In the first chapter, co-authored with Shengmao Cao, we study…

This dissertation studies the effects of China's higher education expansion reform on workers' labor market outcomes. In Chapter 1, I investigate how China's higher education expansion reform affects young workers' labor market outcomes. Using data from the 2005 China Population Survey, I estimate the effects of the reform using a diff-in-diff…

This dissertation focuses on microeconomic topics in the fields of public, labor and education. Particularly, this dissertation evaluates state policies in higher education and develops a global measure for job quality. Chapter 1 studies how state merit aid programs affect undergraduate degrees earned in Science, Technology, Engineering and…

This paper builds a model of human capital accumulation driven by increasing specialization of the workforce. Individuals increase the efficiency of time dedicated to human capital acquisition by focusing investments on narrower sets of skills. The evolution of secondary and post-secondary curricula in the United States from 1870-2000 confirms the…

The present study examined the extent to which the U.S. STEM labor market is stratified in terms of quality of employment. Through a series of cluster analyses and Chi-square tests on data drawn from the 2008 Survey of Income Program Participation (SIPP), the study found evidence of segmentation in the highly-skilled STEM and non-STEM samples,…

This study aims to explore the impact of college quality on early labor market outcomes in China, including the fresh college graduates' initial employment status and starting wages for students who graduated in 2011. The main data source is the College Student Labor Market (CSLM) survey conducted by Tsinghua University. Distinguished from…

In the first chapter, I analyze the growth patterns of postsecondary education costs in re-cent years. It shows the trends of college revenue, expenditure and other financial items using data drawn from the Delta Data Project between 1987 and 2010. Connections between various categories of revenue/spending and state-level macroeconomic indicators…

Departure among student affairs administrators in higher education has been an issue for decades (Evans, 1988; Lorden, 1998; Tull, 2006). Rates of departure from student affairs within the first five years of experience are estimated at 50% to 60% (Holmes, Verrier, & Chisholm, 1983; Lorden, 1998; Tull, 2006). However, there is very little…