In the United States, some states allow undocumented immigrants to benefit from in-state resident tuition policy at public colleges and universities, a benefit aimed at improving accessibility to higher education. Yet, undocumented immigrants face bureaucratic procedures and requirements that may discourage them from applying and delay or hamper…

Unequal access to university and the decision processes that give rise to it are important factors in the accumulation of educational inequalities. In this paper, we investigate a specific aspect of such decision processes by focusing on those students who change their original plans to start a (nontertiary) vocational education and decide to…

The COVID-19 pandemic has overturned daily routines across the entire planet. And newly arrived college students in the fall of 2019 were no exception. In addition to adjusting to the college transition, they had to cope with the multiple consequences of the pandemic's first wave (e.g., confinement, quarantine, physical distancing, remote…

We examine the impact of credit mobility exchange programs' timing on students' academic performance, focusing on the moment in which students travel and the length of the period spent abroad. To provide causal evidence, we exploit unique data from more than 10,000 students from a well-known and internationalized Brazilian university from 2010 to…

The construction of the double first-class university is significant in China's higher education. However, the question of whether students' abilities are better developed at double first-class universities remains unanswered. Based on data from the 2019 Shaanxi University Graduates' Employment and Entrepreneurship Quality Tracking Survey, we…

Using administrative data from nearly 270,000 transfer-intending students who began at 70 community colleges across three state systems, this paper seeks to identify a set of metrics that will be useful to community college leaders as they formatively assess their colleges' efforts to improve STEM transfer outcomes. We find that a relatively…

This study describes course withdrawal behaviors in the Texas public higher education institutions and examines the predictors of course withdrawal by using statewide administrative datasets. The findings showed that two-thirds of the college students in the sample withdrew from at least one course, highlighting course withdrawal as a prevalent…

We examine the potential to expand and diversify the production of university STEM degrees by shifting the margin of initial enrollment between community colleges and 4-year universities. Our analysis is based on statewide administrative microdata from the Missouri Department of Higher Education and Workforce Development covering enrollees in all…

While considerable evidence has accumulated on state-funded merit-based scholarships, research on the effects of specific scholarship design choices has been thin, perhaps in part because cross-state comparisons are difficult. As one of the only states to enact major changes in the design of its merit-based scholarship program, Georgia provides a…

A growing number of states are placing restrictions on whether public universities can increase tuition, and this trend is likely to continue in the future. Yet no research has examined whether tuition caps or freezes have induced more students--particularly from historically underrepresented groups--to enroll in public higher education. In this…

The study investigates a tension between affirmative action scholars who hypothesize that affirmative action bans would increase underrepresented minority students' STEM college completions and scholars who have empirically estimated declines. It also questions results that that find no existence of a STEM penalty (compared to non-STEM) caused by…

One in three students suffers from at least one common mental disorder highlighting the high prevalence of health issues in higher education. At the same time, every third student drops out of university without achieving their degrees. Nevertheless, connections between health and students' dropout behavior have hardly been investigated. Grounding…

The federal government and a number of nonprofit, non-governmental agencies have invested heavily in programs designed to provide research opportunities, financial support, and mentorship to undergraduates in science-related fields. These efforts are aimed at supporting students' matriculation in science majors and into science-related careers.…

This study reports on the development and validation of a new construct of application orientation (AO), which we defined as a vocational orientation concerning the interest for certain principles, values, and activities that are common for university graduates working in applied (i.e., industrial) fields. Using a multi-study program with…

Scholars and the public alike have questioned the benefits of obtaining an undergraduate education. Although research has extensively examined short-term outcomes associated with college experiences, relatively few studies have investigated non-economic outcomes beyond graduation. This paper explored the link between college experiences and…