This study creates a measurement of Title IV funding influence on the institutional financial health of religious higher education institutions. It justifies a method, grounded in financial accounting standards, of using publically available data sources for calculating the Composite Financial Index metric to gauge institutional financial health;…

Education ensures that children from all backgrounds have equal opportunities to succeed. Yet, the education provided for many K-12 students in the state of Texas may not be equal due to the allocation of school funds under House Bill 3 (H.B. 3). To date, the Revenue to Population (RTP) Index and other normalized statistical metrics have not been…

Private postsecondary education leaders are concerned with the value of education and the benefits students receive after graduation. Federal regulations dictate that private postsecondary education institutions will not qualify for Title IV funds if they do not meet minimum student outcome requirements, including cohort default rates and 90/10…

This dissertation consists of three papers. In each paper, I use applied econometric methods to study the interaction between immigration policy and the postsecondary policy. The findings offer insights about how immigration policy can influence the education outcomes of undocumented individuals. In my first paper, I explore the effect on…

Opportunity to learn via public education has origins in the mid-nineteenth-century as a response to Horace Mann's argument that educating girls as well as boys would build a collectively more prosperous society. Over the years, educational reform through the judicial and legislative branches of government has continued to balance opportunity to…

Lottery policies have been created by many states to generate additional funds to support public initiatives, such as higher education scholarships. In 2009, Arkansas adopted a lottery to generate higher education scholarships. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine the Arkansas state lottery policy design process to better…

This study will examine the decision-making process used to construct privatized student housing as well as the factors that contribute to that process among public four-year institutions in New Jersey. A growing number of public universities are exploring ways to develop successful public private partnerships (P3s) in an effort to improve…

This study investigates faculty gender pay equity in higher education. Using data from the 2004 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty and drawing on human capital theory, structural theory, and the theory of comparable worth, this study uses cross-classified random effects modeling to explore what factors may be contributing to the pay…