This dissertation consists of three chapters that examine topics in the economics of education. Chapter 1 tests the impact of holding student loan debt on borrowers' post-schooling decisions, with a focus on how it changes the way they evaluate risks when choosing between jobs. Chapter 2 analyzes the impact of an expansion of public-school choice…

Purpose: This study draws on genre theory to analyze the linguistic and discursive presentation of the self in successful US college application essays. Research Methods: We used qualitative discourse analysis informed by the systemic functional linguistic concepts of field, tenor, and mode to analyze 20 sample application essays identified as…

This paper contributes to debates about gender and diversity in teaching. Exploring the underrepresentation of males, socially constructed as a privileged group, is a complex task for researchers working within a social justice framework. Drawing on a national dataset (N = 5,627), we explore entry patterns to primary and post-primary Initial…

The Prospective Students Survey is one of the Graduate Management Admission Council's (GMAC) keystone research programs. The global graduate management education (GME) community has relied on data from this survey to gain insights about candidates' decision-making processes when considering and applying to graduate business schools since 2009. The…

This report looks at trends since 1997, uniquely combining several data sources to give the most comprehensive view available on how patterns in access to higher education have changed in the years between 1997 and 2022. A major study of higher education trends over the past 25 years reveals persistent access gaps for disadvantaged students,…

A Machine Learning framework for predicting enrollment is proposed. The framework consists of Amazon Web Services SageMaker together with standard Python tools for data analytics, including Pandas, NumPy, MatPlotLib, and ScikitLearn. The tools are deployed with Jupyter Notebooks running on AWS SageMaker. Based on three years of enrollment history,…

Since its writing into Texas state law, only one empirical study has been published which compares the relative ease or difficulty of ApplyTexas against other national-level postsecondary applications of which ApplyTexas competes with. Taylor's (2019) cross-analysis of ApplyTexas versus the Common Application, Coalition for College Application,…

Despite the many benefits of Career and Technical Education programs in high schools, these programs are in a pattern of decline in the United States. There is a gap in the literature regarding secondary administrators' perceptions of CTE programs in their schools, which is important due to the influence administrators have over programs offered,…

When President Biden nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson for the U.S. Supreme Court, it seemed like a major civil rights victory. But that victory could feel like a bitter irony this fall, when the high court hears two cases that will likely obliterate affirmative action. If Jackson gets approved by the Senate, she will probably be making two…

This study assesses differential prediction and differential validity in higher-education admissions policy for individuals with various disabilities, who were granted or denied (on either technical grounds or professional considerations) test accommodations on the Israeli Psychometric Entrance Test (PET). The sample comprised 124,501 records of…

To understand students' college preparation experiences, in May 2021, the authors surveyed high school seniors who took the ACT® test between September 2020 and June 2021. These students reported their intentions to attend a postsecondary institution (i.e., a four-year public college or university, a four-year private college or university, a…

This paper explores the research question and literature pertaining to school counselors and their roles and responsibilities and how they can have an effect on Latino/a students and their A-G college course requirement completion rates. Latinos/as students are the lowest academic achieving students in the nation among their peers and the lowest…

Sino-foreign cooperative universities (SFCU) represent the advanced manifestation of transnational education in China and has profoundly shaped the country's higher education landscape. Despite the tremendous development of SFCUs, there is limited research on the motivations and driving factors of students choosing to study at SFCUs. To bridge…

For decades, college tuition costs have been skyrocketing, yet state financial aid has failed to meet the increasing economic needs of college students -- leaving many young people with the choice of bridging the financial gap by taking out student loans or not attending college at all. This pressing issue of rising college tuition is not just a…

This dissertation consists of two chapters studying problems faced by youths in two contexts that could be pivotal to their future: admissions to higher education and the juvenile criminal justice system. The underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields has been studied extensively, and there have…