West Virginia's three state-funded medical schools enroll more medical students per capita than any other state in the country. Due to its large number of medical student slots, the state typically can offer all qualified West Virginians the opportunity to complete their medical education in the state. In the academic year of 2023-2024, 27 percent…

Universities actively promote themselves to potential students, control admissions and deliver programs of study. For most students globally, there are financial costs to attending university. At the extreme end of failure are students who receive 'zero-fails': they enrol, do not submit any assessments, and receive a mark of 0 out of 100. A…

This study uses secondary data to explore the relationship between the percentage of Latinos enrolled in a postsecondary institution and two educational outcomes: graduating within six years and total amount in student loan debt. Research on the concentration of Latino students in higher education have mostly focused on Hispanic Serving…

Recent research on vocational training in the global South suggests training may have the effect of unrealistically inflating trainee expectations of remunerative employment and upward social mobility. These studies, however, have focused almost exclusively on training for formal sector employment. The present paper, by contrast, explores how…

Purpose: This study examines the relationship between financial literacy and risk-taking behavior in the stock market for both graduates and undergraduates. Design/methodology/approach: This study conducted two surveys on two groups: graduates and undergraduates. The questionnaires were sent to the two groups via "Google Form". The…

We study how health insurance eligibility affects financial distress for young adults using the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) dependent coverage mandate--the part of the ACA that requires private health insurance plans to cover individuals up to their 26th birthday. We examine the effects of both gaining and losing eligibility by exploiting the…

As endowments and fundraising campaigns have skyrocketed in recent decades, critics have attacked higher education for steeply increasing its production cost and price and the snowballing debt of students. In "Wealth, Cost, and Price in American Higher Education," Bruce A. Kimball and Sarah M. Iler reveal how these trends began 150 years…

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to explore how American vocational students describe personal, behavioral, and environmental factors that contribute to their career decisions in the state of Utah. According to the problem statement, it was not known how American vocational students describe the personal, behavioral, and…

Bullying is widely prevalent in the US. Although anti-bullying laws have been implemented across the country since 1999, bullying prevalence rates remain high. Research suggests that being a bully or a bully victim or both makes an individual more likely to experience worse physical, mental, and financial health. This dissertation comprises of…

"The Laboring Scholar: Community College Geographies and the Politics of Care" is an institutional ethnography that investigates the personal, political, and economic costs to student caregivers seeking a college degree. Through a critical analysis of student interviews and a close examination of community college structures and…

In Spring 2022, the Illinois Workforce and Education Research Collaborative (IWERC) conducted a survey of Illinois high school seniors to better understand their college-decision-making processes. Although a vast majority of seniors who answered the survey were attending 4-year or 2-year college, a non-negligible number (n = 355, 14% of the…

This paper documents several facts about graduate program graduation rates using administrative data covering public and nonprofit graduate students in Texas. Despite conventional wisdom that most graduate students complete their programs, only 58 percent of who started their program in 2004 graduated within 6 years. Between the 2004 and 2013…

People convicted of crime are often treated as atomistic individuals by the criminal justice system, ignoring the fact that they are largely embedded in social networks. Research shows that family members are often negatively impacted by their relatives' punishment despite not breaking any laws themselves. These detrimental effects of punishment…

Paying for college is often a family affair, with both parents and students contributing. We study the effects of college on family finances using administrative data on the universe of federal aid applicants in California linked to credit records. We provide the first comprehensive analysis of how both students and their parents use debt with…

From AI tutors who ensure individualized instruction but cannot do math to free online courses from elite universities that were supposed to democratize higher education, claims that technological innovations will transform education often fall short. Yet, as Anne Trumbore shows in "The Teacher in the Machine," the promises of today's…