Dual enrollment (DE) programs allow high school students to take college coursework and simultaneously earn both high school and college credit. These programs have become increasingly popular in recent decades, with roughly one-third of high school students taking at least one DE course. However, the financial implications of taking DE courses…

Many existing student persistence and retention studies overlooked the different types of departure (e.g., dropout, transfer) and aggregate them into a single departure variable, as a result, the estimates from these studies are spurious when one is interested in what student characteristics prompt dropout but not transfer. This can be especially…

Participation in the modern U.S. economy requires that most workers have education and training beyond high school, with over 60 percent of all jobs and 80 percent of middle-class jobs requiring some level of postsecondary education. This report draws upon data from the 2012/14 Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study (BPS:12/14) to…

This study centers the experiences of nontraditional aged women who are 24 or older and the usefulness of Pell Grant funding to increase outcomes for attainment at the certificate, bachelor's, and associate's degree level in higher education. Critical feminist policy analysis guided the research structure, centering of women, and recommendations…

Youth who were in foster care as adolescents make up a small but highly vulnerable subpopulation of the college student body. This article analyzes secondary data collected from one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies of foster youth. The analytic sample includes 329 foster youth from three Midwestern states who attended college in the…

Objective: The purpose of our study was to identify the factors associated with federal loan default among a nationally-representative sample of community college students. The guiding research question was: For community college students who borrow federal loans, to what extent do demographic, academic, and enrollment characteristics relate to…

This research brief uses nationally representative data from the 2012/17 Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study (BPS:12/17) to examine post-college transitions of US undergraduates into the skilled technical workforce (STW), defined here as workers in a collection of occupations that require significant levels of science, technology,…

Student employment subsidies are one of the largest types of federal employment subsidies, and one of the oldest forms of student aid. Yet it is unclear whether they help or harm students' long term outcomes. We present a framework that decomposes overall effects into a weighted average of effects for marginal and inframarginal workers. We then…

The study utilized the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study (BPS:04/06) data set to examine persistence outcomes over a 3-year period across the national sample of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds at public 2-year institutions in the United States. More specifically, the purpose of our study was to investigate how…

The purpose of this dissertation research was to analyze a nationally representative dataset of first-year beginning students to examine the factors that affect Mexican-origin Latinos undergraduate students' persistence and degree attainment outcomes. Several theoretical perspectives are used in this research in order to address the complex…

These Web Tables examine the demographic and postsecondary enrollment characteristics of undergraduates who attended for-profit institutions in 2007-08 and present the 6-year outcomes of undergraduates who first enrolled in for-profit postsecondary institutions in 2003-04. Data are presented for all for-profit students and separately for students…