Three Essays on Responsiveness to Higher Education Related Policies Addressing Inequality

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three chapters focused on student and family responses to both targeted and universal higher education-related policies that have the stated intention of addressing inequalities, particularly by supporting low-income students. In chapter one, I evaluate low-income students’ responsiveness to institutional financial aid policies targeted toward them at public flagship universities. Institutions have implemented what I refer to as income-based loan-minimizing policies (IBLMs) to reduce or eliminate the amount of loans that in-state low-income students must encumber to attend college. Using SAT score sends as a proxy, I show that, when compared to low-income students in states where their flagships did not adopt IBLM policies, the adoption of IBLMs by a flagship has no distinguishable effect on low-income students’ likelihood of submitting an SAT score sends to that flagship. In chapter two, I extend the analysis of IBLMs from the individual student level to the institution level. Prior research has examined whether IBLMs increase the proportion of low-income students on campus. I evaluate whether the adoption of these institutional financial aid policies affects the adopting flagships’ student application pool. Generally, I find that the adoption of these policies did not alter the application pool of IBLM-adopting flagships, nor did these policies cause substantial shifts in the proportion of applications between the adopting colleges and their competitors. Future research should be focused in two areas: (1) admissions decisions by colleges; and (2) how colleges changing financial aid policies can better attract low-income applicants. In the third chapter, co-authored with Edward Kim, we study whether and how students and families respond to universal education policies, or policies that apply equally to all students even though the barriers they address might be particularly relevant for one group (here, low-income students). We use the occurrence of states implementing college entrance exam mandates for all high school students, which provides universal access to an exam, to analyze the effect of these policies on the market for tutoring and test-preparation centers. Results show that adoption of these policies causes an increase in the number of tutoring centers in counties where the state mandated that all students take a college entrance exam. These increases are driven by counties that were in the top third (highest tercile) of a state in terms of income, education attainment of the population, and the proportion of Asians living in that county.