Bridget Terry Long

Addressing the Needs of Underprepared Students in Higher Education Does College Remediation Work

Each year, thousands graduate high school academically underprepared for college. Many must take remedial or developmental postsecondary coursework, and there is a growing debate about the effectiveness of such programs. This paper examines the effects of remediation using a unique data set of over 28,000 students. To account for selection biases, the paper implements an instrumental variables strategy based on variation in placement policies and the importance of proximity in college choice. The results suggest that students in remediation are more likely to persist in college in comparison to students with similar backgrounds who were not required to take the courses.

Does Female Schooling Reduce Fertility? Evidence from Nigeria

The literature generally points to a negative relationship between female education and fertility. Citing this pattern, policymakers have advocated educating girls and young women as a means to reduce population growth and foster sustained economic and social welfare in developing countries. This paper tests whether the relationship between fertility and education is indeed causal by investigating the introduction of universal primary education in Nigeria. Exploiting differences by region and age, the paper uses differences-in-differences and instrumental variables to estimate the role of education in fertility. The analysis suggests that increasing education by one year reduces fertility by 0.26 births.

Do Community Colleges Provide a Viable Pathway to a Baccalaureate Degree

Community colleges have become an important entryway for students intending to complete baccalaureate degrees. However, many question the viability of the transfer function and wonder whether students suffer a penalty for starting at 2-year institutions. The authors examined how the outcomes of community college entrants compared with those of similar students who initially entered 4-year institutions within the Ohio public higher education system. Using a detailed data set, the authors tracked outcomes for 9 years and used multiple strategies to deal with selection issues: propensity score matching and instrumental variables. The results suggest that straightforward estimates are significantly biased, but even after accounting for selection, students who initially began at community colleges were 14.5% less likely to complete bachelor’s degrees within 9 years.

Do faculty serve as role models? The impact of instructor gender on female students

Although women have matched or surpassed men in many educational outcomes such as college access and persistence, female students remain much less likely to major in quantitative, technical, and science-related fields. While women have made progress in recent years, only 20 percent of engineering students are female, and the proportion of women receiving degrees in the sciences and engineering in the United States lags that of other industrialized countries (National Center for Education Statistics, 1995). This underrepresentation of women may have serious implications for women’s returns to education and may relate to occupational segregation and earnings inequality by gender (Linda Loury, 1997). As the economy shifts to favor these more male-dominated fields, there is concern that women will not be prepared to succeed. Moreover, the health of the economy depends on the production of certain kinds of degrees, and the underrepresentation of women in certain areas may contribute to shortages in critical fields. There have been many widely publicized efforts by the government, companies, and schools to increase female representation in male-dominated fields. One focus has been to increase mentoring opportunities for female students by hiring more women faculty members. Theory and evidence suggest that female instructors may be instrumental in encouraging women to enroll and excel in subjects in which they are underrepresented. Female students may avoid male-dominated fields due to biases against women (Sandra Hanson, 1996), and the presence of female faculty may mitigate these effects. David Neumark and Rosella Gardecki (1998) found that female doctoral students with female mentors were more likely to succeed. However, similar to student trends, women are underrepresented on university faculties, particularly in the sciences and quantitative fields, and many worry about the lack of potential role models for female undergraduates. For example, in 2003 Princeton University created a

How do Financial Aid Policies Affect Colleges? The Institutional Impact of the Georgia HOPE Scholarship

10 million fund to hire and promote women faculty in science and engineering departments while Duke’s president pledged

Does Cheaper Mean Better? The Impact of Using Adjunct Instructors on Student Outcomes

1 million per year for the same purpose (Robin Wilson, 2003). In addition, the National Science Foundation’s ADVANCE program continues to push for “increased representation and advancement of women in academic careers and engineering careers” (National Science Foundation, 2004). Does the presence of faculty members of the same gender impact student interest in a subject? This paper answers this question by estimating how having a female faculty member in an initial course affects the likelihood that a female student will take additional credit hours or major in a particular subject. If students choose their courses and major based on their experiences during their initial exposure to a subject, then the instructors they face early in a discipline could influence these decisions. Such an analysis is difficult because few data sets allow researchers to link student outcomes to faculty characteristics. However, using a comprehensive, longitudinal data set of nearly 54,000 students, this paper is among the first, large-scale studies to estimate the impact of faculty on the outcomes of students. Moreover, † Discussants: Ronald Ehrenberg, Cornell University; Brian Jacob, Harvard University; Richard Murnane, Harvard University.

Student Supports: Developmental Education and Other Academic Programs

This paper examines the effects of financial aid policies on the behavior of post-secondary institutions. Using the introduction of the Georgia HOPE Scholarship as a natural experiment, it investigates the impact of the policy on college pricing, institution aid, expenditures, and state appropriations. The results suggest that four-year colleges in Georgia, particularly private institutions, did respond by increasing student charges. In the most extreme case, colleges recouped approximately 30 percent of the scholarship award. As a result, the institutional responses reduced the intended benefit of the scholarship and increased the cost of college for nonrecipients.

Does Remediation Work for All Students? How the Effects of Postsecondary Remedial and Developmental Courses Vary by Level of Academic Preparation

Higher education has increasingly relied on part-time, adjunct instructors. Critics argue that adjuncts reduce educational quality because they often have less education than full-time professors. On the other hand, by specializing in teaching or being concurrently employed, adjuncts could enhance learning experiences. This paper quantifies how adjuncts affect subsequent student interest and course performance relative to full-time faculty using an instrumental variable strategy that exploits variation in the composition of a departments faculty over time. The results suggest that adjuncts often have a small, positive effect on enrollment patterns, especially in fields related to particular occupations.

Mass Instruction or Higher Learning? The Impact of College Class Size on Student Retention and Graduation

Low rates of college completion are a major problem in the United States. Less than 60 percent of students at four-year colleges graduate within six years, and at some colleges, the graduation rate is less than 10 percent. Additionally, many students enter higher education ill-prepared to comprehend college-level course material. Some estimates suggest that only one-third of high school graduates finish ready for college work; the proportion is even lower among older students. Colleges have responded to the poor preparation of incoming students by placing approximately 35 to 40 percent of entering freshmen into remedial or developmental courses, along with providing academic supports such as summer bridge programs, learning communities, academic counseling, and tutoring, as well as student supports such as financial aid and child care. Eric Bettinger, Angela Boatman, and Bridget Terry Long describe the role, costs, and impact of these college remediation and academic support programs. According to a growing body of research, the effects of remedial courses are considerably nuanced. The courses appear to help or hinder students differently by state, institution, background, and academic preparedness. The mixed findings from earlier research have raised questions ranging from whether remedial programs, on average, improve student academic outcomes to which types of programs are most effective. Administrators, practitioners, and policy makers are responding by redesigning developmental courses and searching for ways to implement effective remediation programs more broadly. In addition, recent research suggests that colleges may be placing too many students into remedial courses unnecessarily, suggesting the need for further examining the placement processes used to assign students to remedial courses. The authors expand the scope of remediation research by discussing other promising areas of academic support commonly offered by colleges, including advising, tutoring, and mentoring programs, as well as supports that target the competing responsibilities of students, namely caring for dependents and balancing employment with schoolwork. They conclude that the limited resources of institutions and equally limited funds of students make it imperative for postsecondary institutions to improve student academic supports and other services.

The Role of Application Assistance and Information in College Decisions: Results from the H&R Block Fafsa Experiment*

We examine the impact of remedial and developmental courses on college students with varying levels of academic preparedness, thus focusing on a wider range of students than previous studies. Using a regression discontinuity design, we provide causal estimates of the effects of placement in different levels of remedial courses on short-, intermediate-, and long-term outcomes at both 2- and 4-year colleges. Similar to other research, we find that remediation has negative effects for students on the margin of needing one developmental course. However, for students with lower levels of academic preparation, the effects of remediation are estimated to be positive in some subjects. These results suggest that remedial courses can help or hinder students differently depending on their incoming levels of academic preparedness. Moreover, our conclusions are largely driven by positive and negative effects observed for students at 2-year institutions, and we discuss several hypotheses that may explain these findings.