Given its ongoing struggles at attaining demographic diversity and its key role in nations' economies, the engineering workforce receives considerable attention from researchers and policymakers. Yet, prior studies and STEM recruitment initiatives have often underemphasized the variety among available engineering jobs and careers. It therefore…

Research estimating the outcomes of higher education in Germany has widely ignored the private educational sector. This study focuses on labour market returns in terms of the income of graduates from private higher education institutions in Germany. Using data from the National Education Panel Study (NEPS) the results of the Bayesian regression…

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…

Scholarship on nonresident enrollment by public research universities has developed in isolation from scholarship on linkages between private high schools and selective private universities. We argue that these literatures are part of a broader story about the competition for students from affluent schools and communities. This manuscript analyzes…

The current study examined the relationship between faculty gender diversity (GD) and college and university level outcomes and the role that diversity climate (DC) plays in these relationships in a sample of N = 282 4-year, public and private, non-profit, degree granting institutions in the U.S. Based on social categorization and signaling…

Widespread attention to college tuition and student loan debt has resulted in increasing scrutiny of high levels of compensation for college and university administrators. Prior research has sought to identify a "pay for performance" relationship in executive compensation, but discovered no clear link between presidential salaries and…

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…

In 2010, the Obama Administration proposed new regulations designed to hold institutions of higher education (IHEs) accountable for student outcomes. I examine the effects of the regulatory uncertainty surrounding these "Gainful Employment" (GE) regulations on enrollment at for-profit IHEs. I utilize informational debt rates of GE…

Economic recessions impact higher education institutions in complex ways. Several analyses have examined the influence of the 2007-2009 recession on tuition, enrollments, revenues, and expenditures, but the connection of these resource allocation patterns to a student success outcome--namely, retention--is limited. This study examined…

We define pricing power as a college's ability to increase its net tuition revenue by raising its sticker-price for tuition. The greater is the positive effect of sticker-price increases on net tuition revenue, the greater is the pricing power. We gauge variation in the pricing power of private, non-profit baccalaureate colleges by estimating this…

We use nationally representative survey data from three cohorts of bachelor's degree recipients to examine military veterans' student loan debt at graduation and their employment and earnings 1, 4, and 10 years after graduation, relative to observably similar graduates. We also examine whether the effects of veteran status depend on college…

High school students' accuracy in estimating the cost of college (AECC) was examined by utilizing a new methodological approach, the absolute-deviation-continuous construct. This study used the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09) data and examined 10,530 11th grade students in order to measure their AECC for 4-year public and private…

Do state government policies and institutions promote access to postsecondary education by economically disadvantaged students? I analyze the number of state residents receiving federal Pell grants relative to the college-age population raised in low-income households. Using data for 1993-2008, I estimate separate models for total Pell recipients…

In this study, we examined racial/ethnic differences in grade point average (GPA) among students at a highly selective, private university who were surveyed before matriculation and during the first, second and fourth college years, and assessed prominent explanations for the Black-White and Latino-White college achievement gap. We found that…

This paper analyzes mission drift in baccalaureate colleges. "Becoming a university," defined as a change in organizational name (e.g., Aurora College becomes Aurora University), symbolizes the transition from a liberal arts mission to a comprehensive university mission. Mission drift is conceptualized as a form of "divergent…