Working Papers
Fall Forward or Spring Back? Evaluating Student Outcomes of a Fall-Semester Transition Program at a Public Flagship University
Available at SSRN and SocArXiv.
Does the structure of the first-year college experience affect students’ graduation outcomes? I investigate this question by evaluating UC Berkeley’s Fall Program for Freshmen (FPF), a fall-semester program for undergraduates admitted for the following spring semester. During the fall semester, FPF participants take introductory courses and receive advising at a separate campus blocks away from UC Berkeley, while living and socializing with regular UC Berkeley students; in the spring semester, FPF participants then matriculate to the main campus. I analyze UC Berkeley admissions and registrar data and show that FPF participants are similar to fall-semester matriculants in their admission characteristics and predicted graduation rates. However, across a variety of treatment effect models, I estimate that FPF participants have a 3-4 percentage-point increase in their four- and six-year graduation rates compared to fall-semester matriculants. FPF participants with below-median high school GPAs and SAT scores have larger increases in their likelihood to graduate. Estimates adjusted for unobservable selection bias (Oster, 2017) are similar in magnitude and direction to my main estimates.
Expanding College Access: The Impact of New Universities on Local Enrollment (Job Market Paper)
Do non-tuition costs constrain college access? From 1995 to 2005, California opened four new public universities. I exploit these openings to test whether distance is a binding constraint on four-year college enrollment among new high school graduates. I show that distance is highly influential: Although California has dozens of public four-year colleges, 40 percent of enrollment from new graduates is at schools within 25 miles of home. Using event study and difference-in-difference models, I find that the opening of a new university nearby raises the four-year enrollment rate among recent high school graduates from local high schools by 1.6 percentage point (an 8 percent increase), with no effect on the share of local graduates who attend farther-away campuses. The extensive margin effect and lack of displacement show up across a range of subgroups, including under-represented minority students. My findings support the view that cost-of-living constraints are binding for many prospective college students.
CFPB Reports
Quarterly Consumer Credit Trends: Mortgages to First-time Homebuying Servicemembers
Press release / CFPB blog post
This is part of a series of quarterly reports on consumer credit trends produced by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau using a longitudinal, nationally-representative sample of approximately five million de-identified credit records from one of the three nationwide consumer reporting agencies. This sixth report explores how first-time homebuying servicemembers’ home loan choices have evolved from 2006 to 2016. This report also describes early delinquency rates for these home loans.
Other Papers
College Affordability and the Emergence of Progressive Tuition Models: Are New Financial Aid Policies at Major Public Universities Working? (with John Aubrey Douglass)