The Pathways for Academic Career and Employment (PACE) program is established to provide funding to community colleges for the development of programs that will lead to gainful, quality, in-state employment for members of target populations by providing them with both effective academic and employment training to ensure gainful employment and…

This dissertation focuses on microeconomic topics in the fields of public, labor and education. Particularly, this dissertation evaluates state policies in higher education and develops a global measure for job quality. Chapter 1 studies how state merit aid programs affect undergraduate degrees earned in Science, Technology, Engineering and…

As the early education coordinator for Prince George's County Public Schools, Judith P. Hoyer recognized the gaps in available services for low-income families. In the 1990s, she created a central location in Adelphi, Maryland, for early childhood services, thus fostering cooperation of governmental and private agencies around the needs of local…

Postsecondary education is one of the largest investments that students and their families make, with average yearly cost of attendance--including tuition, fees, room and board--of just under $17,000 to attend a public institution in the 2015-16 academic year. In the context of increasing college costs, aid dollars have failed to keep pace with…

The creation of the Tennessee Education Lottery Scholarship (TELS) program provides a natural experiment where a difference-in-differences estimation design is employed to isolate how state merit aid funding may lead institutions to change their institutional grant aid. Principal agent and resource dependence theories together establish state and…

This dissertation consists of three connected studies. Each study reviews the impact of policies for practice. The policies highlight shifts that aim to foster innovation in their field of implementation. The policies analyzed are ones recently adopted by California and present implications for fiscal accountability and programmatic changes.…

The "Analysis of School Finances in New York State School Districts" is an annual publication providing a meaningful perspective to staff in the Division of the Budget, the Legislature, the Education Department, and school officials concerning school expenditures, State Aid, and local support. This edition of the Analysis summarizes the…

The century-old College Entrance Examination Board (College Board) sponsors, develops, and administers standardized testing programs, most famously the "SAT suite of tests," which includes the SAT college admission test and the "pre-SAT," or PSAT, and the more than thirty Advanced- Placement (AP) courses and exams that…

Texas state grant aid programs provide significant support to many low- and moderate-income state residents pursuing postsecondary education. Only a small share of eligible students receives state grants, however, and students often cannot predict whether they will receive aid, especially if they apply to different types of institutions.…

Idaho's dual credit programs, with a unique state funding model under Advanced Opportunities, have seen substantial growth in student usage in recent years. WICHE analyzed six key topics related to the state's dual credit model: (1) Fiscal impact of using Advanced Opportunities funds for dual credit students specifically; (2) Number of credits…

Every year, there are between 150,000 and 200,000 immigrant students in California who have been in U.S. schools for less than 3 years. These newcomers generally require specialized academic instruction and social services to succeed in school. Despite great efforts, many districts are struggling to create these conditions for success. Many…

Approximately 20 percent of the public school students in the City of Los Angeles attend a charter school. Los Angeles is home to the second-largest school district in the nation. The School Choice Demonstration Project research team has documented disparities between traditional public school (TPS) and charter school funding in Los Angeles…

We examine the correlates of district spending and revenue losses following the onset of the Great Recession and the role of fiscal federalism in mitigating these losses. We estimate whether spending and revenue declines were driven primarily by local labor market conditions or the degree of state fiscal centralization. Utilizing population level…

This case positions the reader as the superintendent of Daly City Community Schools (DCCS), a mid-sized public school district located in the Midwestern United States facing a fiscal crisis. The case requires the reader to propose fiscal alternatives to a school board. For example, the case might invite the reader to consider the appointment of an…

When policy advocates debate how best to ensure equity in public education funding, the topic of teacher pension reform rarely comes up. But, in fact, pensions represent a very large and fast-growing source of education spending, much of it distributed in ways that are, in a number of states, anything but equitable. When states subsidize teacher…