In the nearly fifty years since the adoption of the Higher Education Act of 1965, financial aid programs have grown in scale, expanded in scope, and multiplied in form. As a result, financial aid has become the norm among college enrollees. The increasing size and complexity of the nation's...

This paper examines the impacts of the Michigan Merit Curriculum (MMC), a statewide college-preparatory curriculum that applies to the high school graduating class of 2008 and later. We use a student, longitudinal database for all public school students in Michigan for the main analyses, and...

This paper examines the impacts of the Michigan Merit Curriculum (MMC), a statewide college-preparatory curriculum that applies to the high school graduating class of 2008 and later. We use a student, longitudinal database for all public school students in Michigan for the main analyses, and...

This paper examines the impacts of the Michigan Merit Curriculum, a statewide college preparatory curriculum that applies to the high school graduating class of 2008 and later. We use a student, longitudinal database for all public school students in Michigan for the main analyses, and...

Over the last several decades, there have been historic shifts in the structure of cash transfer programs in Western, developed countries, including the U.S., Canada, and U.K. For all three of these countries, the turn of the 21st century marked a shift away from unconditional cash transfer...

Expansions to the federal and state Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) over the last two decades have made the EITC one of the largest cash transfer programs in the United States. Using a simulated instrument strategy, we analyze how policy-induced changes to the generosity of the EITC have...

As of the early 2000s, the gap in college enrollment between children growing up in the highest income quartile and the lowest income quartile was over 50 percentage points (Bailey and Dynarski 2011). There is much debate in the literature about what role household income plays in producing this...