As colleges and universities grapple with uncertainty around current and future enrollment as well as increasingly vocal questions about the value of postsecondary education, it is critically important that institutions ascertain and invest in the elements of campus learning and engagement that add value to the undergraduate experience. This study…

The purpose of this study is to revisit the widely held assumption that the impact of socioeconomic background declines steadily across educational transitions, particularly at the postsecondary level. Sequential logit modeling, a staple methodological approach for estimating the relative impact of SES across educational stages, is applied to a…

Race shapes many aspects of students' high school experiences that are relevant to the college admissions process. We examine the racially-specific effects of high school course of study on college selectivity. Using NELS 1988-1994, we test how race and track interactively predict the prestige of the first post-secondary institution attended. We…

A common finding in the literature is that institutional structures have little to no impact on student engagement and development. I argue that theory suggests peer ability (as measured by selectivity), institutional density, the differentiation of the curriculum, and the research orientation of the institution should all affect student…

Postsecondary institutions seek to create a pedagogical environment that increases students' knowledge, expands their powers of reasoning, and shapes their psychosocial dispositions. In this study, we examined a conceptual model of academic attainment including two aspects of the pedagogical environment experienced by students, namely the…

A survey suggests that mail surveys may yield more accurate responses regarding important personal financial information than more costly telephone interviews. Increasing pressures to integrate studies of short-term economic impacts with analysis of higher education's impact on long-term regional economic development are discussed. (Author/MLW)