Implementation of ESA programs will not be easy. The ESA model is novel and foreign to most state education agencies, which have little to no experience with helping families purchase a wide variety of educational goods and services using government funds. Even if agencies had the relevant experience, ESA programs are complex, involving millions…

Student veterans are a unique population on college/university campuses who may face numerous obstacles associated with transitioning from service member to student. One of the most daunting challenges these student veterans face occurs when they earn a grade for Failure for Nonattendance (FA). The GI Bill ®/Post 9/11 benefits that student…

Promise programs are discussed as a policy movement that began with the 2005 launch of the Kalamazoo Promise. Since then, programs bearing the Promise label or sharing similar features have spread across the higher educational landscape, appearing in most states and across postsecondary sectors. Simultaneously, scholarly literature discussing…

When the federal government banned incarcerated students from accessing Pell Grants in the mid-1990s, a new model for supporting Higher Education in Prison (HEP) programs emerged--utilizing Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) as third-party facilitators to fill the gaps left behind in the absence of federal financial aid. With the long-awaited…

The Tennessee Education Lottery Scholarship (TELS) program was designed to meet the unique needs of the State of Tennessee, while also incorporating the hallmark elements of existing merit-based aid programs in other states. This manuscript provides a snapshot of TELS recipients and their outcomes, including narrative discussion on the current…

In order to assist higher education institutions and their students during the pandemic, the federal government established the Higher Education Emergency Relief (HEER) Fund, which directed over $75 billion to institutions of higher education--including nearly $25 billion to community colleges--over a three-year period. The U.S. Department of…

Given the proliferation of college promise programs and the increasing popularity of last-dollar designs, we explore changes to states' financial aid resource environments following the adoption of two of the largest and longest-operating state programs: Tennessee Promise and Oregon Promise. We leverage descriptive tools and a causal-inference…

As college promise programs proliferate across the United States with noted intentions to promote access through increased affordability, it is necessary to understand the relationship between these programs and other forms of financial aid, including loans. Using federal, state, and program-level data, we leverage a natural experiment to estimate…

Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) are private savings accounts funded by a deposit from the state government and managed by a parent. The deposit amount varies from state to state and is typically based on the state's per-pupil amount. To use an ESA, parents withdraw their child from the public school system and use ESA funds to purchase specified…

Pell eligibility for incarcerated people is a great rehabilitative opportunity, but several challenges remain. This article recaps five of the issues identified by the original research articles in this special issue. It also considers how solutions proposed in these studies may be beneficial across a variety of these issues and gathers…

In this study I deployed quasi-experimental methods to explore enrollment responses to a unique statewide college promise program for adult students attending college within the two-year public postsecondary education sector in Tennessee. State policymakers implemented Tennessee Reconnect in 2018 to encourage adult students without a college…

Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) are private savings accounts funded by a deposit from the state government and managed by a parent. The deposit amount varies from state to state and is typically based on the state's per-pupil amount. To use an ESA, parents withdraw their child from the public school system and use ESA funds to purchase specified…

For decades, college tuition costs have been skyrocketing, yet state financial aid has failed to meet the increasing economic needs of college students -- leaving many young people with the choice of bridging the financial gap by taking out student loans or not attending college at all. This pressing issue of rising college tuition is not just a…

"Free college" has become a catch phrase for a variety of policy proposals intended to support this national priority. Most free college proposals share important goals: to reduce costs to students and families, to increase the number of college graduates, and to help students acquire skills needed in the workforce. Free college…

The purpose of this dissertation is to understand how and why different state financial aid policy designs have developed, with particular attention to external influences, and what effect those design choices have on student outcomes. In the first essay, I use the theoretical framework of diffusion to understand the design and adoption of…