For years Georgia's HOPE Scholarship program provided full tuition scholarships to high-achieving students. State budgetary shortfalls reduced its generosity in 2011. Under the new rules, only students meeting more rigorous merit-based criteria would retain the original scholarship covering full tuition, now called the Zell Miller Scholarship,…

Students starting at a two-year college are much less likely to graduate than similar students who start at a four-year college, but the sources of this attainment gap are largely unexplained. This paper investigates the attainment consequences of sector choice and peer quality among recent high school graduates. Using data on all Preliminary SAT…

We compare teacher preparation programs in Missouri based on the effectiveness of their graduates in the classroom. The differences in effectiveness between teachers from different preparation programs are much smaller than has been suggested in previous work. In fact, virtually all of the variation in teacher effectiveness comes from…

State policies affect the qualifications of beginning teachers in numerous ways, including regulating entry requirements, providing incentives for graduate degrees, and subsidizing preparation programs at public universities. In this paper we assess how these policy choices affect student achievement, specifically comparing traditionally prepared…

Using restricted-access data from one of the largest urban public university systems in the United States--where many undocumented students are eligible for in-state tuition--we review the literature on undocumented college students in the United States and provide a comparison of the performance of undocumented students to that of U.S. citizens…

National Board Certification (NBC) for teachers has become an important innovation in long-standing efforts to improve teacher quality. As states, districts, and teachers increasingly invest resources in this process, information is needed on its cost, impact, and value. This analysis estimates the full opportunity cost of four NBC support…

Since the early 1990s, state governments have distributed billions of dollars in financial aid through merit-based college scholarships, most of which have no means tests. The model for most of these programs is Georgia's Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally (HOPE) scholarship. Given the high correlation between precollege academic achievement…