Do college admissions counselors discriminate? Evidence from a correspondence-based field experiment

I design and implement a correspondence based field experiment to test for race and gender discrimination among college admissions counselors in the student information gathering stage. The experiment uses names to identify student race and gender, and student grade, SAT score, and writing differences to reflect varying levels of applicant quality. I find that counselors do not respond differently by race in most cases, but there are measurable differences in response/non-response and in the type of correspondence sent that favor female students. I also find that the quality of the student induces large differences in the type of response.     

Does high school quality matter? Evidence from admissions data

This paper examines the effect of attending elite private high school on college placement using admissions data from the most selective high school in a large metropolitan area. To overcome omitted variable bias, we limit the sample to admitted applicants and control directly for the scores assigned by admissions based on in-depth analyses of the applicants and their families. In addition, we control for a wide set of covariates including student and family characteristics and entrance exam scores. Results indicate that attending selective private high school rather than other public and private high schools causes students to attend more selective universities. Effects are driven by gains for girls and students from lower-income neighborhoods.     

Do flexible admission systems affect student enrollment? Evidence from UK universities

We reveal the current level of flexible admission systems (FAS) at UK universities, and explore its impact on student enrollment rates. We employ quantitative analysis techniques for data collected and customized from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) in the UK, during the period 2010–2015. To understand the impact of FAS on student enrollment, six statistical tests were conducted. Based on the level of FAS adopted by universities, we identified four groups of UK universities: very low, low, medium, and high levels of FAS. No robust evidence exists to support claims that universities which apply a higher level of FAS have higher student enrollment. The study results were based only on secondary data collected from HESA, so future studies should be based on other types of data. This paper attempts to cover the missing elements of previous literature and its traditional research techniques.     

Who benefits from selective education? Evidence from elite boarding school admissions

Existing research finds minimal gains from attending elite US secondary schools. This paper estimates the causal effect of attending a selective public boarding school, an institutional model increasingly used by states to serve academically gifted students. Regression discontinuity estimates using multiple admissions thresholds show math score gains and college application and enrollment patterns that shift away from less competitive colleges. Effects are concentrated among minorities, students with lower prior individual achievement, from rural neighborhoods, or lower-achieving sending schools. The opportunity to attend selective boarding schools reduces the tendency of disadvantaged or under-represented students to attend a less selective college by at least one-quarter.     

Has the college wage premium continued to rise? Evidence from multiple U.S. surveys

This paper examines trends in the college wage premium (CWP) by birth cohort across the five major household surveys in the United States: the Census/ACS, CPS, NLSY, PSID, and SIPP. We document a general flattening in the CWP for birth cohorts 1970 and onward in each survey and even a decline for birth cohorts 1980–1984 in the NLSY. We discuss potential reasons for this finding and show that the empirical discrepancy is not a function of differences in composition across surveys. Our results provide crucial context for the vast economic literatures that use these surveys to answer important policy questions about intertemporal changes in the returns to skill.     

Does cram schooling matter? Who goes to cram schools? Evidence from Taiwan

Attendance at cram schools is an experience that the majority of Taiwanese have while growing up. However, the incidence and impact of cram schooling are still understudied and have yet received much attention. In this paper, I first illustrate the development of cram schools in Taiwan, and demonstrate the important changes on institutional factors and legitimacy of cram schools. Then I use data collected by Taiwan Education Panel Survey to investigate the net effect of cram schooling on students’ academic performance, and to test whether the opportunity of cram school participation reflects specific patterns of stratification.Empirical results indicate that cram schooling does matter: attending cram schools has a significantly positive effect on a student's analytical ability and mathematical performance. However, cram school participation does not reflect specific patterns of social stratification: the opportunity of going to a cram school for a male student is not significantly different from that of a female; the effects of family background on students’ cram school participation are not as critical as they were in the past.     

Do girls’ scholarship programs work? Evidence from two countries

This study examined the extent that a scholarship program operating in Sierra Leone and Djibouti was successful in increasing girls’ persistence in basic education. Results of field studies indicated that scholarships could be appropriately targeted and delivered in ways that appear to minimize misappropriation of funds. However, the scholarships often created significant tensions between award recipients and non-recipients and among their families that frequently isolated recipient girls and led to their harassment by non-recipients. These findings are interpreted within the context of the larger debate about the relative merit of abolishing school fees for all students or targeting scholarships for only the neediest students.     

Does simplifying the college financial aid process matter?

The IRS Data Retrieval Tool, a financial aid simplification tool accessed by 7 million students (nearly 40% of FAFSA filers) a year, was suddenly removed during the middle of the 2017 application cycle. Exploiting variation in 1,600 institutional deadlines influencing the amount of time students lacked access to the tool, I find a null effect of its paperwork reduction properties on college access outcomes. Form simplification alone seems unlikely to have the same beneficial impacts as personal assistance in the college financial aid setting, calling into question the notion that small hassle costs by themselves meaningfully deter program take-up.     

Understanding gender differences in STEM: Evidence from college applications✰

While education levels of women have increased dramatically relative to men, women are still greatly underrepresented in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) college programmes. We use unique data on preference rankings for all secondary school students who apply for college in Ireland and detailed information on school subjects and grades to decompose the sources of the gender gap in STEM. We find that, of the 22 percentage points raw gap, about 13 percentage points is explained by differential subject choices and grades in secondary school. Subject choices are more important than grades – we estimate male comparative advantage in STEM (as measured by subject grades) explains about 3 percentage points of the gender gap. Additionally, differences in overall achievement between girls and boys have a negligible effect. Strikingly, there remains a gender gap of 9 percentage points even for persons who have identical preparation at the end of secondary schooling (in terms of both subjects studied and grades achieved); however, this gap is only 4 percentage points for STEM-ready students. We find that gender gaps are smaller among high-achieving students and for students who go to school in more affluent areas. There is no gender gap in science (the large gaps are in engineering and technology), and we also find a smaller gender gap when we include nursing degrees in STEM, showing that the definition of STEM used is an important determinant of the conclusions reached.     

Do Charters Pose a Threat to Private Schools? Evidence from Nationally Representative Surveys of U.S. Parents

Charter schools increasingly challenge both district and private schools for student enrollments in the United States. With more parents able to choose among the sectors, the success of each in attracting students will turn in part on the levels of satisfaction provided to families who enroll. We analyze data from two nationally representative surveys of parental perceptions. Private school parents are the most satisfied with the climate, student behavior, and school-to-parent communications in their child’s school, but the gap between private school parents and charter parents is much less than the one between private school parents and those in district schools. We find little difference across sectors in satisfaction with school infrastructure and in school–parent communications about student behavior. Because charters, like district schools, are free, this narrowing of the satisfaction gap between the tuition-based and free school sectors may erode the size of the private sector.     

How do admission committees select? Do applicants know how they select? Selection criteria and transparency at a Dutch University

Tertiary Education and Management - In this study, we investigated the currently applied selective admission criteria and tools of the two-year research master’s programs of both the Graduate...     

Does gender matter for the intergenerational transmission of education? Evidence from rural China

Many studies have examined whether children’s gender influences their educational attainment. However, there are limited studies on both the impact of parents’ education on children’s education and the educational gender gap in rural China. This paper investigates the impact of parents’ education on their children’s education from a gender perspective in rural China using comprehensive rural household data. We find that the educational gender gap in rural China has been decreasing over the last several decades. Moreover, the educational gender gap decreases as parents’ education increases. Parents’ initial educational attainment plays an important role in narrowing the educational gender gap.     

Do schools discriminate against homosexual parents? Evidence from a randomized correspondence experiment

The recognition of homosexual rights is a controversial issue in many countries. Spain was the third country in the world (after the Netherlands and Belgium) to introduce a law recognizing homosexual marriage and the adoption of children by homosexual couples. In this paper, we examine for the first time whether schools are more hesitant about giving feedback to homosexual parents during children's pre-registration period in Catalonia (Spain). To do so, we designed a correspondence experiment to be conducted in schools. We created three types of fictitious couples—one heterosexual, one gay, and one lesbian—and sent emails to schools in which the couples’ sexual orientation was explicit. Our results show that gay couples had a significantly lower (22 percentage points) call-back probability than heterosexual couples. No statistically significant differences in call-back probability were found between the lesbian and heterosexual couples.     

Do universities benefit local youth? Evidence from the creation of new universities

In this study, I examine university and college participation rates, as well as graduate outcomes, following the establishment of a university in cities where there were previously none. The creation of a local university is associated with a large increase in university attendance among local youth in each affected city. However, the increase in university participation came at the expense of college participation in most cities. Furthermore, not everyone benefited equally from new universities in terms of university enrolment. In the short run, the creation of a local university is associated with a substantial increase in the probability of moving out of one city for men and women. For men, employment rates rise, while for women, there is an increase in business services and public sector employment.     

Do student migrations affect school performance? Evidence from Wisconsin's inter-district public school program

This paper examines the competitive effects of a unique school choice program implemented in the late 1990s, Wisconsin's open enrollment program, which allows families to send their children to schools outside their home district. In contrast to other school choice programs, districts not only face negative consequences from losing students and state funding, but they also stand to gain in the event of student emigration from other districts. The identification approach exploits differences in the number of schools in bordering districts, which affects inter-district ease-of-transfer. Estimates produce three main conclusions. First, districts that experience student out-migration produce higher standardized test scores in the subsequent year. Second, these effects are most evident among districts for which out-migration, expressed as a percentage of enrollment, falls in the upper quartile of all districts under consideration. Third, districts do not appear to respond to in-migration, indicating that districts place more emphasis on (and have more control over) preventing out-migration, as opposed to encouraging in-migration. These findings provide evidence that schools respond to competitive forces by improving quality.     

Do increases in national-level preschool enrollment increase student achievement? Evidence from international assessments

The main purpose of the study is to analyze whether globally observed trends towards preschool expansion have impacted student achievement in primary and secondary school. We use data from multiple study cycles of two international large-scale assessments that have a longitudinal component at the country level—PIRLS and PISA—and combine these data with a country-level measure of preschool enrollment rates as the main explanatory variable. Employing a multilevel regression with fixed effects for countries and years, we find that changes in preschool enrollment are unrelated to changes in average student achievement. Even after controlling for covariates on the individual and country levels, we do not find any support for the policy expectation that expanding preschool enrollment per se leads to better student achievement on country level.     

Do course evaluations truly reflect student learning? Evidence from an objectively graded post-test

It is difficult to assess the extent to which course evaluations reflect how much students truly learn from a course because valid measures of learning are rarely available. This paper makes use of a unique setting in which students take a common, high-stakes post-test which is centrally graded and serves as the basis for capturing actual student learning. We match these student-specific measures of learning to student-specific course evaluation scores from electronic records and a rich set of student-level covariates, including a pre-test score and other measures of skills prior to entering the course. While small in magnitude, we find a robust positive, and statistically significant, association between our measure of student learning and course evaluations.     

Do Financial Education Interventions for Women from Poor Households Impact Their Financial Behaviors? Experimental Evidence from India

Policymakers have invested significant resources in financial education to improve financial literacy of the poor, reduce bad financial decision-making, and increase take-up of financial services and products. Yet, there is limited evidence on the effectiveness of such interventions, especially in developing countries. This paper provides evidence from a clustered randomized controlled trial (RCT) where a relatively light financial education program (one day of training) was offered to a large sample of women (n = 1,281) from poor households in informal community settings. The educational intervention was a significant departure from the more costly traditional classroom-style adult education interventions. It was based on simple “rules of thumb” and used a goal-oriented and action-focused approach, targeted at changing behaviors. We find evidence of modest, positive treatment effects for some outcomes including an increase in personal savings, achieved at a relatively low cost of training per participant.