This study estimates the value of the private and public benefits that accrue to Minnesota residents from state government subsidies to higher education. In 2005, the University of Minnesota and the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system received $832 million from Minnesota's state...

Community colleges play a major role in postsecondary education, yet previous research has emphasized the impact of merit aid on four-year students rather than two-year students. Furthermore, researchers have focused on the impact of merit aid on enrollment and outcomes during college, but to my...

Over the years, the minimum dropout age has been raised to 18 in 21 states. Although these policy changes are promoted for their educational benefits, they have been shown to reduce crimes committed by youths in the affected age groups. However, an unintended consequence of increasing the...

This paper examines the effect of working during higher education on academic progression, in terms of number of credits acquired by first-year university students in Italy. We discuss different contrasting hypotheses on the role of employment during university on academic outcomes: the zero-sum...

This study uses a fixed effects panel data framework to examine the effects of cohort crowding and other variables on nonresident enrollment at four-year public colleges and universities. The results suggest that larger cohorts of resident students crowd out nonresident students at flagship...

Grade inflation over the past few decades has been a concern for many universities. Course evaluation scores are known to be positively correlated with students’ expected grades, and this paper tests whether or not there is an incentive for the instructor to “buy” higher evaluation scores...

A lengthy literature estimating the returns to education has largely ignored the for-profit sector. In this paper, we estimate the earnings gains to for-profit college attendance using restricted-access data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97). Using an individual fixed...

This paper studies whether the introduction of tuition fees at public universities in some German states had a negative effect on enrollment, i.e., on the transition of high school graduates to public universities in Germany. In contrast to recent studies, we do not find a significant effect on...

Our study analyzes the impact of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme, a college-preparatory educational program designed for higher-achieving students, on high school academic achievement in Chicago Public Schools. We exploit exogenous variation in the offering of the program...

This study exploits a unique policy environment and a large panel dataset to evaluate the impact of school crowding on student achievement in Wake County, NC. We also estimate the effects of two education policy initiatives that are often used to address crowding: multi-track year-round...