Evidence-based and student-centered instructional methods hold the promise of transforming undergraduate STEM education and simultaneously solving the dual challenge of STEM workforce needs and inequities within STEM. The Learning Assistant (LA) Model was created to reform curriculum, recruit teachers, and inform discipline-based education…

Increasing numbers of students require internet access to pursue their undergraduate degrees, yet broadband access remains inequitable across student populations. Furthermore, surveys that currently show differences in access by student demographics or location typically do so at high levels of aggregation, thereby obscuring important variation…

While a substantial body of work has shown that higher-SES students tend to apply to more selective colleges than their lower-SES counterparts, we know relatively less about "why" students differ in their application behavior. In this study, we draw upon a sociological approach to educational stratification to unpack the SES-based gap in…

Higher education researchers using survey data often face decisions about handling missing data. Multiple imputation (MI) is considered by many statisticians to be the most appropriate technique for addressing missing data in many circumstances. In particular, it has been shown to be preferable to listwise deletion, which has historically been a…

We define pricing power as a college's ability to increase its net tuition revenue by raising its sticker-price for tuition. The greater is the positive effect of sticker-price increases on net tuition revenue, the greater is the pricing power. We gauge variation in the pricing power of private, non-profit baccalaureate colleges by estimating this…

The goal of this study is to evaluate the effect of crime and discipline on graduation rates in higher education. Using national data on more than 1250 public and private non-profit institutions that were drawn from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, the results reveal that more violence on and around campus is associated with…

A rich interdisciplinary literature exists exploring the determinants of state higher education funding policies. However, that work has collectively ignored an important finding from political economy literature: namely, that citizens' preferences regarding public spending are strongly influenced by the state's ethnic and racial context. Drawing…

Having an effective segmentation strategy is key to the viability of any organization. This is particularly true for colleges, universities, and other nonprofit organizations--who have seen sharp declines in private contributions, endowment income, and government grants in the past few years, and face fierce competition for donor dollars…

The Integrated Postsecondary Education System (IPEDS) collects data on Title IV institutions. The Delta Cost Project (DCP) integrated data from multiple IPEDS survey components into a public-use longitudinal dataset. The DCP Database was the basis for dozens of journal articles and a series of influential policy reports. Unfortunately, a flaw in…

College affordability continues to be a top concern among prospective students, their families, and policy makers. Prior work has demonstrated that a significant share of prospective students forgo financial aid because they did not complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA); recent federal policy efforts have focused on…

This research focuses on course-taking patterns of beginning community college students enrolled in one or more non-remedial science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses during their first year of college, and how these patterns are mapped against upward transfer in STEM fields of study. Drawing upon postsecondary transcript…

This study develops and empirically tests a conceptual model capturing the factors impacting students' cross-cultural adaptation and the outcomes resulting from such adaption. Data were obtained from a sample of international postgraduate students from six Malaysian public universities using a structured questionnaire. Structural equation…

Increasingly colleges and universities use survey results to make decisions, inform research, and shape public opinion. Given the large number of surveys distributed on campuses, can researchers reasonably expect that busy respondents will diligently answer each and every question? Less serious respondents may "satisfice," i.e., take short-cuts to…

The heightened mobility of resources, ideas, and cultural practices across national borders--commonly known as "globalization"--entails changes in the contexts in which US research universities operate. We draw on recent developments in neo-institutional theory to understand these changes and their implications for the ways in which US…

Previous studies argued that high school resources play a modest role in students' postsecondary destinations, but they ignored schools' programmatic resources, which provide opportunities for marks of distinction, such as Advanced Placement courses, and they focused on older cohorts of high school students who entered colleges before competition…