This guide provides a review of research on higher education persistence indicators that can be used to predict whether a student will remain enrolled in college and complete a two- or four-year degree.
As prospective college students and their parents pore over the Department of Education’s College Navigator and College Scorecard, Andrew Gillen suggests in this blog that they pay close attention to the financial implications of their choice. Ensuring that college is affordable should be high on the list of policy priorities, ...
Parents, teachers, schools, districts, states, and especially students all want schools that prepare graduates to thrive in the 21st century. In this blog post, Anne Mishkind asks what it means to be "college and career ready."
In this blog post, AIR scholar Audrey Peek explores income-share agreements (ISAs), a private form of financial aid that offers cash for college now in return for a percentage of students’ future earnings over a set time. Peek contends ISAs are an innovative way to pay for college that might ...
Recent data shows that while students from low-income families began 9th grade with high aspirations of going to college, by junior year their expectations decline considerably. In this blog post, Sakiko Ikoma and Markus Broer argue that closing the enrollment gap between low-income students and their more affluent counterparts means ...
Higher levels of educational attainment are associated with outcomes such as full-time employment and higher pay for young adults. However, college attainment, student persistence through college, and borrowing varies by generation status. This brief examines background and educational characteristics, plans for college, postsecondary enrollment, and postsecondary completion patterns of first-generation ...
The Obama administration took a step toward the President’s planned college ratings system on December 19, releasing a 24-page “Framework” for college ratings. In this blog post, Tom Weko asks, "Are the Department of Education's college ratings likely to become an enduring feature of the nation’s higher education landscape?" ...
The 2008-09 recession struck hard at college and university finances. In this blog post, AIR's Steven Hurlburt explains that, while colleges and universities continue to show signs of fiscal recovery in 2013, some worrying shifts remain, particularly for public higher education.
The college admissions scandal that broke in March 2019 drew attention to the lengths that a few people go to cheat or pay their children’s way into these colleges, and to the way colleges make decisions about who gets accepted. Alexandria Walton Radford, a managing researcher at AIR and director ...
Although a wealth of research has shown that financial aid reduces hurdles to college enrollment, relatively little is known about how aid affects students after they are enrolled, much less how they react to the common occurrence of losing aid midway through their college careers. A CALDER working paper co-authored ...