We estimate the impact of external financial support on the labor supply of students during their tertiary education. Using a dynamic labor supply model and accounting for the endogeneity of income from private transfers, we find a significantly lower likelihood of being employed for transfer...

A considerable fraction of college students and bachelor's degree recipients enroll in multiple postsecondary institutions. Despite this fact, there is scant research that examines the nature of the paths – both the number and types of institutions – that students take to obtain a bachelor's...

This paper adds to the understanding of student decisions about graduate school attendance by studying the magnitude of the effect of business cycle fluctuations on enrollment. I use data on graduate school enrollment from the Current Population Survey and statewide variation in unemployment...

We investigate how much value college enrollment adds to students’ critical thinking, problem-solving and communication skills, and the role college inputs play in developing these competencies, using data from a 2009 collegiate assessment pilot study in Colombia. Relative to observationally...

Women are less likely than men to earn degrees from high quality post-baccalaureate programs, and this tendency has been growing over time. I show that, aside from the biomedical sciences, this cannot be explained by changes in the type of program where women tend to earn degrees. Instead,...

College students are taking longer to earn baccalaureate degrees now than ever before, but little is known about institutional factors that may contribute to this trend. In this paper we investigate an important institutional constraint—course scarcity—that we hypothesize may be associated...

Using a large administrative dataset from a statewide system including 34 community and technical colleges, the authors employed an instrumental variable technique to estimate the impact of online versus face-to-face course delivery on student course performance. The travel distance between each...

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...

This paper analyzes how high-ability students respond to different indicators of university quality when applying for a university. Are prospective students influenced by quality indicators of a university ranking or by an excellence status awarded within a nationwide competition? And if so, are...

Professional competencies are a key factor in gauging how employable a graduate is. This paper demonstrates that individuals who have best developed the competencies which firms feel to be most important are more likely to be in a position to obtain a job. To this end, we have developed an...