Retaining people no longer credited toward college completion--a group known in academic parlance as "stop outs"--is a core concern among administrators seeking to remove barriers to education. Preventing stop outs from becoming stay outs means re-enrolling students beset by debt, or targeting vulnerable demos close to graduation.…

In this dissertation, I study the relationships between financial aid, student characteristics, persistence, and completion in three separate chapters. In all three chapters, I use detailed, student-level administrative data from the UNC System beginning in the Fall 2013 semester. The first chapter is entitled "Tuition Reduction and Student…

Disruption of educational pursuits due to orders for military activation is inconvenient and discouraging to students who are soldiers. Deployment was an issue at institutions of higher education during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm in 1990 and 1991 and during the peace-keeping mission in Bosnia in 1996. Four weeks after the attacks of…