This chapter was written for a book published in India. The anticipated audience for this paper is generally for residents of India. Reading news reports and some academic commentary in India, I find that private higher education is very readily berated and dismissed. This is surprising to me,...

We present evidence on how The Quantum Opportunity Program (QOP hereafter) worked in the US. While the program was regarded as successful in the short-term, in the long-run its educational results were modest and its effects on risky behaviors detrimental. Exploiting control group's...

This paper is the first to use a randomized trial in the US to analyze the short- and long-term impacts of an after-school program that offered disadvantaged high-school youth: mentoring, educational services, and financial rewards to attend program activities, complete high-school and enroll in...

This paper presents a dynamic model of the decision to pursue a college education in which students face uncertainty about their future income stream after graduation due to unobserved heterogeneity in their innate scholastic ability. After students matriculate and start taking exams, they...

This paper reviews recent studies on the effectiveness of services and incentives offered to disadvantaged youth. We focus our analysis on three types of interventions: mentoring, educational services, and financial rewards. The objective of this article is threefold. First, we explain...

This paper uses data envelopment analys is to investigate the extent to which universities in the United States have undergone productivity and efficiency changes, partly due to managerial performance, during the 2005-09 academic years. Using panel data for 133 research and doctoral...

This paper provides new evidence on the effect of school construction projects on home prices, academic achievement, and public school enrollment. Taking advantage of the staggered implementation of a comprehensive school construction project in a poor urban district, we find that, by six years...

We present evidence on how The Quantum Opportunity Program (QOP hereafter) worked in the US. While the program was regarded as successful in the short-term, in the long-run its educational results were modest and its effects on risky behaviors detrimental. Exploiting control group's...

This paper is the first to use a randomized trial in the US to analyze the short- and long-term educational and employment impacts of an after-school program, the Quantum Opportunity Program, that offered disadvantaged high-school youth: mentoring, educational services, and financial rewards...

Launched in 2004, the Carolina Covenant combines grant-heavy financial aid with an array of non-financial supports for low-income students at an elite public university. We find that the program increased four-year graduation rates by about 8 percentage points for eligible students in the...