We study the evolution of a campus-based aid program for low-income students that began with grant-heavy financial aid and later added a suite of non-financial supports. We find little to no evidence that program eligibility during the early years (2004–2006), in which students received...

I take advantage of a sharp discontinuity in the probability of admission to an elite university at the admission score threshold, to estimate causal returns to college education quality. I use a newly constructed dataset, which combines individual administrative records about high school,...

The private return to postsecondary investment varies widely by field, but the resources required by different fields are not well known. This paper establishes five new facts about college costs using novel department-level data. First, costs vary widely across field, ranging from electrical...

This survey organizes and discusses the theoretical and empirical literature on the determinants of university student achievements. According to the theoretical framework, the decision to invest in tertiary education is a sequential process made under gradually decreasing levels of uncertainty...

This paper examines the financial value over the course of a lifetime of pursuing a college degree under a variety of different settings (e.g. major, student loan debt, individual ability). Using a lifecycle simulation approach, I account for ability/selection bias and the substantial...

Fe y Alegria is an organization working in many developing countries as a public-private partnership. This study estimates the effect of one Fe y Alegria school in Peru on mathematics and reading comprehension among second grade primary pupils, between 2007 and 2012. The identification strategy...

A concern in higher education policy is that students are taking longer to graduate. One possible reason for this observation is an increase in off-campus labor market participation among college students. Financial aid may play a role in the labor/study choice of college students-as college...

This paper exploits student-level administrative data on the population of Italian university students from 2006 to 2014 to analyze the effects of high performing (HP) male or female peers on individual academic performance, according to the gender of the student. The identification strategy is...

There is increasing evidence that tax credits for college do not affect college enrollment. This may be because prospective students do not know about tax benefits for credits or because the design of tax credits is not conducive to affecting educational outcomes. We focus on changing the...

Financial aid has been shown to affect student outcomes from enrollment to graduation. However, effects on graduation can be driven either by marginal students induced to enroll by financial aid, or by inframarginal students who would have enrolled anyway but received additional financial aid....