This study seeks to assess whether self-interest influences support for two policies to cancel student debt--one forgiving all student debt and one taking a means-tested approach to debt forgiveness. Each of these policy proposals offers a material benefit to certain groups of individuals while imposing cost or having no benefit to others, which…

This dissertation contains three essays discussing government policy in higher education, the effects of online social networks during college on students after graduating, and how to use search data as a tool to recover characteristics of both products and customers to estimate demand. In the first chapter, co-authored with Shengmao Cao, we study…

A growing body of literature points to the importance of political ideology in the deployment of motivated reasoning, in the formation of packages of policy stances, and in the polarization of groups. However, little research exists on how ideology impacts college students and their experiences in higher education. This study extends the…

The current study aims to examine and compare predictors of attitudinal support for campus carry and concealed carrying behaviors on a campus where faculty, staff, and students can legally carry a weapon. This explores the relationship between attitudes and behaviors as it relates to concealed weapons on campuses. Whereas attitudinal correlates…

This three-study dissertation investigated how socioeconomic factors and policies are associated with educational outcomes for undocumented youth and, in one of the papers, to what extent education and employment outcomes intersect. Guided by the specific questions of each study, the three papers take different theoretical and methodological…

The research investigates the interdependencies among higher education, motivation, belonging, and development. Also, the study covers the literature on integration and gender of international migrants. The first study examines the motivation to serve and its predictors among Turkish military officers and Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs) prior to…

While Value-Belief-Norm (VBN) theory has been widely applied to various populations, it has seldom been tested on college students. This study extends VBN theory to examine what socio-psychological factors influence sustainability behaviors among university students. Undergraduate students are an interesting and novel population, as they are still…

In France, the university has been experiencing a major crisis for several decades in the form of a high rate of student failure, particularly during the "licence," or first cycle of studies. This prolonged crisis has led educational researchers to focus on the predictors of student failure in University. This paper reviews the existing…

Because juveniles can now be registered as sex offenders, we conducted a pilot study to investigate awareness of these policies and sexual behavior histories in a convenience sample of 53 young adults (ages 18 to 23, 79% women). These preliminary data revealed that 42% percent of participants were unaware that youth under the age of 18 can be…

This paper examines the potential of self-reported information on capabilities as an alternative indicator and aggregator for well-being. We survey a population of 18 year old first-year Bachelor students in applied economics and business studies and demonstrate a way in which capabilities can be measured on the level of life domains as well as on…

Student loan default, defined as federal loan borrowers' failure to make any payments for at least 270 days, is an issue of increasing importance to community colleges and their students. This report takes a unique look at student loan default at nine community colleges across the nation, and how those colleges are working to help students avoid…

This paper presents a framework informed by spatial models of politics to explain the dynamics of political competition in higher education policy and, in particular, the observed instability in the relationship between political variables and policy outcomes. To this end, I explore competing hypotheses for the relationship between government…

We investigate the nature of protests by students (age 18 and older) in Algeria, Jordan, Morocco, and Yemen by using subsamples of students from nationally representative and acclaimed public opinion data (the 2006-07 "Arab Barometer"). We find between 22.1% (Jordan) and 54.7% (Yemen) participated in either the signing of petitions, or…

Despite the significant implications of the foreign doctorates' stay or return decision on a personal level, as well as for the home and host countries, there is very little research that provides a comprehensive understanding of the factors that predict international doctorates' decision to stay in the US and how those factors differ by country…

Universities in Europe have been playing an increasingly important role in the institutional evaluation of political and social systems for the last thirty years. Their major contribution to those processes of accountability has been to add methods and safeguards of evaluative research. In this paper we report an illustration of how evaluative…