Colleges are increasingly interested in identifying the factors that maximize their enrollment. These factors allow enrollment management administrators to identify the applicants who have higher tendency to enroll at their institutions and accordingly to better allocate their money rewards (i.e., scholarship and financial aid). In this paper we…

We investigate factors influencing student sign-ups for Washington State's College Bound Scholarship (CBS) program. We find a substantial share of eligible middle school students fail to sign the CBS, forgoing college financial aid. Student characteristics associated with signing the scholarship parallel characteristics of low-income students who…

Traditionally, modeling student retention has been done by deriving student success predictors and measuring the likelihood of success based on several background factors such as age, race, gender, and other pre-college variables, also known as the input-output model. Increasingly, however, researchers have used mediating factors of the student…

This study examines the institutional factors associated with student loan default. When a college has more than 30% of its students default on their loans, then the institution faces federal sanctions that could make them ineligible from participating in the federal student loan program. Using Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System…

Previous research has shown that participation in programs designed to connect students to campus can increase student success and retention. However, very little of this research has controlled for selections bias. The purpose of this study was to use propensity score matching to control for selection bias while analyzing three campus connection…

Using data from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002), this dissertation focuses on the forms of capital (resources) at the individual, school and state levels that influence the probability of college enrollment. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to three interrelated articles that comprise Chapters 2 through 4. Chapter 2…

This study examines the default behavior of 3,325 undergraduate student borrowers who attended Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU) and entered repayment on their TG-guaranteed Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP) loans between October 1, 2000 and September 30, 2002 (fiscal years 2001-2002). Using the Department of Education's official…