Social scientists have developed numerous asset-based wealth indices to assess and target socioeconomic inequalities globally. However, there are no systematic studies of the relative performance of these different measures as proxies for socioeconomic position. In this study, we compare how five asset-based wealth indices--the International…

Commonfund's Higher Education Price Index® (HEPI) data show that costs for colleges and universities rose 3.4 percent in FY2024, a decreased rate of inflation compared with 4.0 in FY2023 and 5.2 percent in FY2022. (FY2024 covers the period from July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024, and coincides with the budget year of most educational institutions.)…

In this dissertation, I explore questions relating to estimating and framing college net pricing. In the first study, I measure variation in actual grant aid awards for students predicted by the federal template Net Price Calculator (NPC) to receive identical aid awards. Estimated aid derived from the federal template NPC accounts for 85 percent…

We use statewide administrative data from Missouri to examine the role of high schools in explaining students' initial college and major placements at 4-year public universities. To facilitate our investigation of postsecondary sorting, we develop a "preparation and persistence index" (PPI) for each university-by-major cell in the…

Student fees make up 20% of the total cost of tuition and fees at the typical four-year public, yet little research has been conducted to examine institutional-level and state-level factors that may affect student fee charges. I use panel data to find that institutional selectivity and athletics spending do not influence student fee levels.…

We derived an index of high school academic rigor by optimizing the prediction of first-year college GPA based on high school courses taken, grades, and indicators of advanced coursework. Using a large data set (n~108,000) and nominal parameterization of high school course outcomes, the high school academic rigor (HSAR) index capitalizes on…

This Statistics in Brief examines three cohorts of recent college graduates 1 year after they attained their bachelor's degree. The graduation years for the three cohorts span a 15-year period: 1992-93, 1999-2000, and 2007-08. The latest cohort (2007-08) graduated in the midst of the 2008 recession. This Statistics in Brief first examines how…

A heuristic approach to explaining of the Black-Scholes option pricing model in undergraduate classes is described. The approach draws upon the method of protocol analysis to encourage students to "think aloud" so that their mental models can be surfaced. It also relies upon extensive visualizations to communicate relationships that are…

It is often of interest to estimate partial or semipartial correlation coefficients as indexes of the linear association between 2 variables after partialing one or both for the influence of covariates. Squaring these coefficients expresses the proportion of variance in 1 variable explained by the other variable after controlling for covariates.…

The consistency/variability of error substitution patterns may hold important implications for subgrouping children with speech disorders, as well as for relationships between learning and generalization patterns. There is a need to quantify and examine the range of consistency/variability within the speech disordered population as it relates to…