This study explored the transition from secondary to postsecondary education among a national sample of students who had or had not studied music in high school. Using evidence from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, a nationally representative longitudinal study of 21,440 American high school students who were ninth graders in the…

A large literature in higher education research has focused on disparities in rates of successful completion of the various steps along the path that leads to college enrollment (e.g. completing a college preparatory curriculum, taking the SAT or ACT, applying to a college) as an important source of inequitable college attainment between groups of…

This dissertation consists of two chapters studying the importance of household income for shaping student outcomes in the market for higher education in the United States. The first chapter uses the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 to document that conditional on student ability, high-income students are more likely to enroll in college and…

To evaluate how Advanced Placement courses affect college-going, we randomly assigned the offer of enrollment into an AP science course to over 1,800 students in 23 schools that had not previously offered the course. We find no substantial AP course effects on students' plans to enroll in college or on their college entrance exam scores. Yet AP…