The goal of this study was to understand the relationship between the graduation rates of first-generation college students and the offering of multidisciplinary student support services by universities. Recent decades have witnessed a rise in first-generation college students, but little research on their graduation rates. The literature is also…

Do tuition vouchers and cash subsidies promote educational or labor force outcomes for "non-traditional" students? I use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the impacts of a state aid program with an unobserved eligibility cutoff. Eligibility has no impact on degree completion for students with a preference for community…

The purpose of this study was to examine how the college support programs, services, and activities offered to Hispanic students at Forsyth Technical Community College influence college performance, retention and graduation rates, and overall satisfaction with the college experience. The underlying goal was to raise awareness, across the college,…

Graduating from a liberal arts college leads to meaningful economic mobility (Hill & Pisacreta, 2019). College graduates typically lead longer and healthier lives, are more engaged civically, and generate more economic output (Committee on Education and Labor Report, 2019). Despite these facts, there continues to be widespread doubt about the…

Recent policy and research efforts have focused on simplifying the college-going process, improving transparency around college costs, and helping students make informed decisions. In 2012, the Obama administration released the "shopping sheet," a standardized financial aid offer that is intended to provide students with simplified…

AACRAO partnered with a large public university in the southwestern United States to examine a multi-year data set and to complete a student survey in order to gain insights into variables that contribute to excess credit accumulation at graduation. Until state legislatures began to decrease funding for public colleges and universities, excess…

Using data on charter and public school districts in Texas, we test the hypothesis that the labor practices in charter schools, in particular their ability to easily dismiss poorly performing teachers, diminishes the negative effect of teacher turnover on student achievement and graduation rates in comparison to public schools. We find some…

When Arizona State University announced in 2015 that it would offer a freshman year's worth of credit-bearing "massive open online courses" (MOOCs) for a fraction of the cost of its regular online and in-person classes, the news was met with both excitement and alarm. Education reformers proclaimed the move groundbreaking, saying it…

We describe the design and implementation of the Mathematics Learning Community structured as a cohort-based and faculty-mentored group composed mostly of underrepresented minority students in mathematics. The Mathematics Learning Community's goals are: (i) to increase the number of students majoring in mathematics at both the undergraduate and…

As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the School Improvement Grants (SIG) program received more than $3 billion with the goal of substantially improving student achievement. The SIG program's funding was to help states turn around the nation's persistently lowest-achieving schools using one of four school intervention…

Prior work has demonstrated that debate is associated with academic achievement in high school. Whether debate in high school is predictive of better college outcomes beyond its established relationship with promoting college readiness as indicated by the ACT is unknown. This research examines and evaluates the impact of participating in a high…

This report summarizes the academic and post-secondary outcomes for student athletes and non-athletes in the 2017-2018 school year.

The contributions in this collection provide important answers and compelling evidence that honors programming does contribute something above and beyond what honors students themselves bring to the educational experience. While many of the chapters rely on analytic methods that are more widely used in some fields than in others, authors have…

The Regional Educational Laboratory Northeast and Islands (REL-NEI) partnered with the New York State Education Department (NYSED) to examine the pathways used by students to attain a Regents diploma at the outset of a new policy expanding those pathways in June 2015. Under the new 4+1 pathways policy, students could replace one of the two…

Online student enrollment has continually increased over the last 15 years, creating and perpetuating a demand for postsecondary institutions to continually offer more courses, as well as degree programs, online. However, this demand has also prompted differing attitudes towards online learning as being comparable and as rigorous as face-to-face…