In 2002, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Early College High School Initiative (ECHSI) with the primary goal of increasing the opportunity for underserved students to earn a postsecondary credential. To achieve this goal, Early Colleges provide underserved students with exposure to, and support in, college while they are in…

Cash incentives for high school students to perform better in school are growing in popularity, but not everyone understands them. Does paying students for better Advanced Placement (AP) test scores encourage enrollment in AP classes? The author set out to determine the impact of a cash incentive program operating in a number of Texas high…

Much research and many policy initiatives to date have focused on access to postsecondary education. However, despite the fact that college attendance has increased considerably over the last three decades, the proportion of students who complete college has decreased. This lack of persistence and degree completion in college, especially among…

This study reconsidered school effects on college enrollment by focusing on strategies that schools use to facilitate college transitions. It also examined whether school strategies influence different outcomes for students from different racial/ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Using data from the High School Effectiveness Study, the analysis…

While access to education may be increasing, equity still eludes the U.S. education system, specifically for low socioeconomic status students. Using both educational and deviance theoretical frames, this study examines the effectiveness of adolescent intervention programs with respect to educational attainment and deviant behaviors. The Education…

In January 2009, in the last week of the Bush Administration, the U.S. Department of Education (ED), upon orders from the departing political appointee staff, published the final report in a long running National Evaluation of Upward Bound (UB). The study was conducted by the contractor, Mathematica Policy Research. After more than a year in…

The school accountability movement has led to a marked increase in the use of standardized test scores to measure school and teacher productivity, yet little is known about the correlation between test score gains and improvements in long-term outcomes. In the first chapter of my dissertation, I study the impact of a school choice policy in…

The purpose of this study is to examine resource allocation patterns and the predictive power of these resources in increasing the likelihood of four-year college enrollment among academically qualified, low-income students. Using data from the Educational Longitudinal Study, college choice decision-making is conceptualized in relation to an…

College access can be defined as the successful transition from high school to college, leading to successful completion of a college degree. This study focuses on how much support for college-going students receive while in high school. Previous research has found that group differences in college-going rates are related to differences in social…

In El Paso, Texas, the public institutions of higher education have joined with area school districts to create the El Paso College Readiness Initiative. Through a great deal of coordination and cooperation among the participating institutions, high school faculty, students, and parents are introduced to the placement test used by the city's…

This paper asks whether high school leadership activities play an important role in explaining the Hispanic college-completion gap. The analysis in this paper considers the role that English language fluency plays in a Hispanic student's leadership probability and in the student's future educational success. The main results in this paper are:…

Most studies focus on the effects of charter attendance on short-term student achievement (test scores), using either data sets that follow students over time or random assignment via school admission lotteries to control for differences between students in charter and traditional public schools. Beyond measuring achievement effects, however,…

This article examines the expectation to complete a bachelor's degree among a predominantly low-income, mainly African American, panel of Baltimore youths at the end of high school, at age 22, and at age 28. Across this time, stability is the modal pattern, but when expectations change, declines are more frequent than increases. Although…

We examine immigrant generation differences in college attendance and college type among youth ages 18 through 26 who have graduated from a U.S. high school. Results indicate that first- and second-generation immigrants are significantly more likely to attend college than their third-plus generation counterparts of similar race/ethnicity,…

Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in New Orleans, LA in April 2011. The first study evaluated the level of interest in engineering as students approached the end of high school and explored the degree to which the academic preparation of these students shaped the engineering pipeline over a…