This report provides a deep dive into higher ed admissions employees, who play a key role in the future sustainability of colleges and universities. In addition to highlighting the pay and size of the admissions workforce, the report focuses on time in position, diversity, and pay equity. Taken together, we find that colleges and universities have…

Majoring in business typically pays off. While graduates' earnings and federal student loan debt vary by institution and degree level, the majority of business programs lead to median earnings that are roughly 10 times graduates' debt payments two years after program completion. "The Most Popular Degree Pays Off: Ranking the Economic Value of…

Climbing the ladder of institutional prestige is often promoted by leaders and policymakers in higher education, but there may be trade-offs associated with striving for status. This study examines the impact of Texas's National Research University Fund (NRUF), which uses financial incentives to support institutions' pursuit of prestige, on the…

A committee report accompanying a national defense authorization bill for fiscal year 2022 includes a provision for the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to review the Department of Defense's (DOD's) payroll system for overseas DOD Education Activity employees. This report: (1) describes the status of DOD's efforts to address auditors' prior…

In 2021, Child Trends was selected to conduct a literature review and develop a policy and practice report to map the history of systemic racism in the U.S. and how it has influenced early childhood education (ECE) policy and practice, with a particular focus on educator pay and benefits, preparation, and workforce stability. This report…

The study is devoted to the evaluation of the determinants of job-education mismatches and their impact on salaries of university graduates. We use a comprehensive and nationally representative survey of Russian university graduates. The study employs a self-evaluated measure of mismatch and a statistical variant for robustness and interpretation…

The three chapters of this dissertation use tools of applied microeconomics to study topics related to education and regulation. The first chapter, "Where Doctors Work," studies how openings and closures of medical schools in the United States have affected the geographical distribution of doctors. The principal contribution is the…

Over half a century after pay discrimination became illegal in the United States, a persistent pay gap between men and women continues to hurt our nation's workers and our national economy. Women working full time in the U.S. are paid 82 cents to every dollar earned by men -- but it doesn't stop there. The consequences?of this gap?affect?women…

Racial equality has been of great importance to the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), as seen through various initiatives. However, in recent years, little research has been done regarding the racial wage gap in ARL libraries. Researchers used thirty-five years of raw ARL salary survey data to examine the wage gap between racial minorities…

This First Look report introduces new data for national and state-level public elementary and secondary revenues and expenditures for fiscal year (FY) 2022. Specifically, this report includes the following school finance data: (1) revenue and expenditure totals; (2) revenues by source; (3) expenditures by function, subfunction, and object; (4)…

As students transition between high school and college or career, many have begun to consider their future career paths or want to identify career options that will best fit them. To better understand the types of career characteristics that students want to explore, this study surveys a random sample of 11th and 12th-grade students who registered…

Policymakers enacted a series of reforms in the mid-2000s that significantly expanded benefits in the federal student loan program for students pursuing graduate degrees. These reforms allow students to borrow up to the full cost of attendance for their degrees and use an Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) program that offers loan forgiveness after 20…

Results from two studies provided strong evidence for the validity of the HiSET® tests, thereby demonstrating that HiSET is a well-developed battery of tests with passing and college and career readiness (CCR) standards that, when met, provide a pathway to postsecondary education, better employment opportunities and wages, and a better quality of…

For decades, the federal government has expected vocationally focused programs in higher education, especially among for-profit colleges, to lead to gainful employment in a profession. In the mid-2010s, the U.S. Department of Education developed gainful employment (GE) regulations that sought to tie a program's federal financial aid eligibility to…

We investigate the male-female gap in principal compensation in state and national data: detailed longitudinal personnel records from Missouri and repeated cross-sections from the nationally representative Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). In both data sets, we estimate substantively important compensation gaps for school leaders. In Missouri,…