Coursework: ITP Seminar

Elise Marifian (ITP Fellow)
Economics

"Financial Aid, Cost Uncertainty, and Student Enrollment Choices: Evidence from Bucky’s Tuition Promise"

This paper examines how a four year, full-tuition guarantee for modest income residents affects their probability of accepting an enrollment offer at the state flagship. In recent years, colleges have increasingly adopted tuition promise programs to address informational and behavioral barriers to low-income individuals' college attainment. Despite evidence that high-achieving students from low-income backgrounds are less likely than their affluent peers to attend a selective college, few states offer tuition promise programs at their selective public flagship institutions. I study how the college enrollment choices of academically talented students were impacted by the 2018 introduction of one such program—Bucky’s Tuition Promise—at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which promises four (two) years of grant aid to cover undergraduate tuition and fees for incoming first year (transfer) resident students whose household adjusted gross income (AGI) falls below the state median. To identify the causal effect of a BTP offer on admitted students' enrollment decisions, I adopt two strategies: a Regression Discontinuity (RD) design which leverages the discontinuity in BTP eligibility at the household AGI cutoff, and a Differences-in-Differences (DID) design which exploits the unanticipated nature of the policy and data from prior year cohorts. I find that BTP increases enrollment yield by 6 to 7 percentage points among low- and moderate- income residents, with the two designs generating similar results while shedding light on different aspects of the policy’s impacts.

Dr. Timothy Nokes-Malach
University of Pittsburgh

"Using Large Educational Data Sets to Understand Factors that Affect Student Success in STEM" 

Understanding both the barriers as well as the pathways to student success is critical to support all students to learn and achieve in STEM. In this talk, I will describe a research project that brings together an interdisciplinary team of learning scientists to understand the factors that affect student success in STEM disciplines. We are particularly concerned with questions about for whom educational innovations are effective, and their longitudinal outcomes. I will describe the overarching project and how we bring together different types of data and expertise to answer these questions. I will then describe one strand of the project in depth that has focused on understanding underrepresentation of women in physics. As a first step, we have begun to examine student motivational and performance patterns across multiple large introductory physics courses. The findings have implications for the development and implementation of pedagogies and resources to help all students learn.

Dr. Douglas Harris
Tulane University

Optimal College Financial Aid: Theory and Evidence on Free College, Early Commitment, and Merit Aid from an Eight-Year Randomized Trial

Required readings

Douglas N. Harris, Jonathan Mills

We provide theory and evidence about how the design of college financial aid programs affects a variety of high school, college, and life outcomes. The evidence comes from an eight-year randomized trial where 2,587 high school ninth graders received a $12,000 merit-based grant offer. During high school, the program increased their college expectations and non-merit effort but had no effect on merit-related effort (e.g., GPA). After high school, the program increased graduation from two-year colleges only, apparently because of the free college design/framing in only that sector. But we see no effects on incarceration or teen pregnancy. Overall, the results suggest that free college affects student outcomes in ways similar to what advocates of free college suggest and making aid commitments early, well before college starts, increases some forms of high school effort. But we see no evidence that merit requirements are effective. Both the standard human capital model and behavioral economics are required to explain these results.

Dr. Allison Atteberry

Dr. Jessica Calarco
Indiana University