Mary Ziskin

Student Aid and Its Role in Encouraging Persistence

For more than 3 decades, scholars and practitioners have speculated on the extent to which financial aid increases the odds of students completing their degrees. While the impact of financial aid on persistence has been studied a great deal, we know relatively little about the impact of aid on graduation. This chapter provides a comprehensive review of the extant research on how student financial aid affects undergraduate student persistence and graduation. In this pursuit, 74 articles, chapters, and monographs published after 1990 were reviewed to shed light on (a) how the studies define student persistence and student financial aid, (b) the summative knowledge of the relative effects of grants and loans on within-year persistence, continuous enrollment, and graduation, (c) how the existing studies were able to untangle the effects of merit- and need-based aid, and (d) the effect of debt on student persistence.

Getting serious about institutional performance in student retention: Research‐based lessons on effective policies and practices

The Indiana Project on Academic Success and the College Board Pilot Study on Student Retention evaluated the effectiveness of a variety of approaches to student retention. The authors share empirically grounded insights gleaned from this research.

The Study of Institutional Practices Related to Student Persistence

Using literature and illustrations drawn from a pilot study, this article explores the theoretical and methodological challenges entailed in the study of student retention. We center the discussion around two important efforts to expand the theoretical base and scope for research in this area: Bergers (2000) concept of colleges and universities as optimizers of cultural capital and Bensimons (2007) recent critique of the narrowness of the frames that predominate student retention research. By way of exploring these issues through a concrete example, the article presents an overview of processes and findings from a funded pilot study of institutional policies and practices surrounding student retention. This exploration—part essay, part research report—leads us ultimately to pose two central questions on which, we suggest, future research should build: What are institutions doing to improve student retention? and How do institutions intervene in the workings of cultural capital in higher education?

Institutional Merit-Based Aid and Student Departure: A Longitudinal Analysis

The use of merit criteria in awarding institutional aid has grown considerably and, some argue, is supplanting need as the central factor in awarding aid. Concurrently, the accountability movement in higher education has placed greater emphasis on retention and graduation as indicators of institutional success and quality. In this context, this study explores the relationship between institutional merit aid and student departure from a statewide system of higher education. We found that, once we account for self-selection to the extent possible, there was no significant relationship. By contrast, need-based aid was consistently related to decreased odds of departure.