This paper uses detailed administrative data from one of the largest community colleges in the United States to quantify the extent to which academic performance depends on students being of similar race or ethnicity to their instructors. To address the concern of endogenous sorting, we use both...

Many wonder whether teacher gender plays an important role in higher education by influencing student achievement and subject interest. The data used in this paper helps identify average effects from male and female university students assigned to male or female teachers. In contrast to previous...

Administrative data from a large and diverse community college are used to examine if underrepresented minority students benefit from taking courses with underrepresented minority instructors. To identify racial interactions we estimate models that include both student and classroom fixed...

Many North American college students have trouble satisfying degree requirements in a timely manner. This paper reports on a randomized field experiment involving two strategies designed to improve academic performance among entering full-time undergraduates at a large Canadian university. One...

We design and experimentally evaluate two low-cost, scalable interventions - an online preparatory module and a text-message coaching program - in a sample of over 3,000 undergraduate students at a large Canadian university. Supplementing administrative data on academic outcomes with a unique...

This paper presents an independent large-scale experimental evaluation of two online goal-setting interventions. Both interventions are based on promising findings from the field of social psychology. Approximately 1,400 first-year undergraduate students at a large Canadian university were...

We design and experimentally evaluate two low-cost, scalable interventions – an online preparatory module and a text-message coaching program – in a sample of over 3,000 undergraduate students at a large Canadian university. Supplementing administrative data on academic outcomes with a...