Deregulation of for-profit colleges led to a precipitous rise in enrollments from 1990 to 2010. Since 2010, regulation, investigations, and sanctions have led to enrollment declines in for-profit postsecondary institutions. Initially barred from receiving Title IV federal funds, in the form of Pell Grants and Stafford Loans, for-profit colleges…

Latinx student enrollment in college has dramatically increased in recent years, yet they are more likely than other racial groups to enroll at open access and public two-year institutions (Rodriguez, 2015). While public-two-year sector provides an encouraging postsecondary pathway for Latinx students, only 13% of all community college students…

Objective: Increasing rural community college degree attainment is very important to foster rural areas' economic and social well-being. Rural community colleges differ greatly from their suburban and urban counterparts in financial aid patterns and student bodies. However, existing literature is vacant with respect to student financial aid and…

It is well established that students who begin post-secondary education at a community college are less likely to earn a bachelor's degree than otherwise similar undergraduates who begin at a 4-year school, but there is less consensus over the mechanisms generating this disparity. We explore these using national longitudinal transcript data and…

This report provides a "first look" at selected findings from the 2012/14 Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study (BPS:12/14). It is based on final data describing a nationally representative sample of undergraduates who entered postsecondary education for the first time during the 2011-12 academic year. BPS:12/14 covers the…

Background/Context: Student utilization of complex enrollment patterns has been identified as a significant recent development in higher education. Nearly a dozen different multi-institutional attendance patterns have been identified, including co-enrollment. Co-enrollment is simultaneous enrollment at two or more colleges or universities during…

The summer school sessions that colleges offer their undergraduates are sometimes considered supplementary activities and are rarely perceived as central to a college's mission or effectiveness. However, analyses of college transcript data that tracked a nationally-representative sample of undergraduates for several years and through multiple…

This overview of postsecondary education in the United States reviews the dramatic changes over the past fifty years in the students who go to college, the institutions that produce higher education, and the ways it is financed. The article, by Sandy Baum, Charles Kurose, and Michael McPherson, creates the context for the articles that follow on…