College Access: The Enrollment Decision
College Access and Enrollment Decisions
This paper analyzes the postsecondary decisions of high school graduates from 1972, 1982, and 1992 to understand how the roles of college costs and quality have changed. Two college decisions are examined. First, how did individuals choose between colleges? Second, how did college characteristics affect whether individuals attended college? The paper approximates a person's college outlook by exploiting extensive match-specific information between students and colleges and including the thousands of alternatives available to prospective students.
Long, B.T. (forthcoming 2014) “The Financial Crisis and College Enrollment: How have Students and Their Families Responded?How the Financial Crisis and Great Recession Affected Higher Education. Jeffrey Brown and Caroline Hoxby, Eds. University of Chicago Press.
This paper explores how the Great Recession affected college enrollment and costs to families. As with past recessions, reductions in income and increases in tuition prices could have had negative effects on enrollment, while growing unemployment could have had the opposite effect by reducing the foregone costs of attending school. However, the Great Recession occurred within a much more complex postsecondary context than ever before, with the important role of loans and changing availability of debt, a major increase in the number of college-age students, and substantial policy changes in federal financial aid. The net effect of these positive and negative pressures is unclear and likely to vary for different subpopulations. Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, I investigate how the Great Recession altered decisions about college enrollment, attendance intensity, and household expenditures.
College Access for Specific Populations
Long, B. T. “The Reversal of the College Gender Gap: The Role of Alternatives and College Supply.”
During the last decade, women have surpassed in men in a number of postsecondary outcomes including college enrollment. Currently, 55 percent of college students are women (NCES, 2004). This trend could have serious implications for returns in the labor market as well as social outcomes such as marriage and fertility. This paper explores several possible explanations for the reversal of the gender gap. While past work has focused on the college wage premium, I also take into account the role of secondary school performance by gender, non-labor market alternatives such as the military and incarceration, and changes in the availability of different kinds of colleges (e.g. community colleges). The empirical framework uses state-level variation in these factors during the last three decades to examine these hypotheses.