Administrative burden, or the frictions individuals experience in accessing public programs, has implications for whether and which eligible individuals receive aid. While prior research documents barriers to accessing federal financial aid, less is known about the extent to which state aid programs impose administrative burden, how administrative…

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is the primary gatekeeper to secure financial aid for college. The federal government instituted two changes to the process in 2017, commonly known as "prior-prior year" FAFSA: (1) an earlier start date that lengthens the filing period and (2) the ability to use completed taxes from…

Private nonprofit colleges are increasingly using tuition resets, or a decrease in sticker price by at least 5%, to attract new students and counter declining demand. While discounting tuition with institutional aid is a common practice to get accepted students to matriculate and to increase affordability, a tuition reset is a more transparent…

This study estimates the short- and long-term effects of undergraduate educational debt on students' decisions to apply and to enroll in graduate school after completing requirements for a baccalaureate degree, using marginal mean weighting through stratification method (MMW-S) to analyze data from the National Center for Education Statistics…

To improve college access for low-income students, an increasing number of public colleges and universities have implemented no-loan policies, where student loans are replaced with institutional grant aid that does not require repayment. Using detailed income measures provided by Mobility Report Card data, this study examines the effect of no-loan…

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, going to college has become increasingly financially difficult in the United States. Tuition prices continued to rise, state funding for higher education declined, and the mean family income declined or stagnated for all but the top 20 percent of families (Goldrick-Rab 2016). In a period where college…

This paper studies the impact of the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 that amended employer-sponsored education assistance (ESEA) fringe benefits from taxable to nontaxable for graduate studies. ESEA is an integral part of graduate education finance and is the dominant non-loan source of student aid. Using…

Parents vary in both their willingness and ability to pay for their children's college expenses, yet there is little research on how adolescents' expectations of future financial support from parents affect their college enrollment decisions. Using data from the High School Longitudinal Study, I fill this gap in the literature by examining the…

In recent decades, several dozen colleges and universities have instituted loan-reduction initiatives (LRIs), such as "no-loan" programs. Institutions frequently cast such initiatives as efforts to increase socioeconomic diversity on campus. Using a difference-in-differences analytic strategy with national institution-level data, we…

The study of student loan debt remains a timely and relevant higher education finance research and policy-oriented topic, especially when considering the alarming growth rates of student loan debt balances. The Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit released in May of 2018 shows that among all debt balances, student loans remain the only…

The current studies test the hypothesis that the financial burden of college can initiate a psychological process that has a negative influence on academic performance for students at selective colleges and universities. Prior studies linking high college costs and student loans to academic outcomes have not been grounded within relevant social…

More than 40 years of research has found a positive relationship between increases in the proportion of non-resident students enrolling in an institution and increases in the tuition prices this institution charges to these same students. Notably, this line of research has consistently treated this non-resident student body as if they constitute a…

In the United States, college students must complete the Free Application for Student Federal Aid (FAFSA) to access federal aid. However, many eligible students do not apply and consequently forgo significant amounts of financial aid. If students have perfect information about aid eligibility, we would expect that all eligible students complete…

Recent research on economic returns to higher education in the United States suggests that those with the highest wage returns to a college degree are least likely to obtain one. We extend the study of heterogeneous returns to tertiary education across multiple institutional contexts, investigating how the relationship between wage returns and the…

Evidence from behavioral economics suggests that the framing and labeling of choices affect financial decisions. Through a randomized control trial of over six thousand high school seniors, community college students, and adults without a college degree, we identify the existence of both framing and labeling effects in respondents' preferences for…