As a companion paper to our work on students' application and colleges' admission decisions, we have estimated a joint discrete-continuous utility maximization model of college attendance and college completion. The paper is motivated by the possibility that test scores are poor predictors of...

The effects of particular attributes of colleges on the subsequent earnings of individuals who attend are much discussed but rarely studied systematically. Here we seek to compare the earnings patterns of people attending different types of colleges. The classification of colleges used in this...

This paper describes the effects of two variants of a virtual college-counseling intervention designed to reduce informational and social support barriers to college application and enrollment among socioeconomically disadvantaged students. Students who were randomly assigned to the program felt...

Using multiple datasets from different time periods, we document declines in academic time investment by full-time college students in the United States between 1961 and 2003. Full-time students allocated 40 hours per week toward class and studying in 1961, whereas by 2003 they were investing...

This paper estimates the effect of paid employment on grades of full-time, four-year students from four nationally representative cross sections of the Harvard College Alcohol Study administered during 1993-2001. The relationship could be causal in either direction and is likely contaminated by...

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Graduate Education Initiative (GEI) provided over $80 million to 51 treatment departments in the humanities and related social sciences during the 1990s to improve their PhD programs. Using survey data collected from students who entered the treatment and 50...

Each year, thousands of students graduate high school academically unprepared for college. As a result, approximately one-third of entering postsecondary students require remedial or developmental work before entering college-level courses. However, little is known about the causal impact of...

One of the most pronounced trends in higher education over the last decade has been the increased reliance on instructors outside of the traditional full-time, Ph.D.-trained model. Nearly 43 percent of all teaching faculty were part-time in 1998, and at selective colleges, graduate assistant...

Remediation is an important part of American higher education with approximately one-third of students requiring remedial or developmental courses. However, at an annual cost of over $1 billion for public colleges alone, policymakers have become critical of the practice. Despite the growing...

Every year, thousands of high school seniors with high college aptitude face complicated menus' of scholarship and aid packages designed to affect their college choices. Using an original survey designed for this paper, we investigate whether students respond to their menus' like rational human...