Essays on higher education in the United States: The effects of contemporary state- and institution-level policies on student outcomes

This dissertation investigates the role of contemporary state- and institution-level policies in public higher education in the United States. In Chapter 1, I examine the effect of earning college credit in a statewide dual credit course on student postsecondary enrollment and early performance outcomes. I find that banking college credit in high school increases the probability that a student enrolls in college within a year of high school graduation by approximately 5 percentage points. This effect is driven by the boost in the likelihood of postsecondary enrollment at public two-year institutions for passers of career-related, technical courses (e.g., Plant Science). However, I find little evidence that banking college credit improves measures of early college performance along the dimensions of credit accumulation, GPA, or remediation. Chapter 2 utilizes student-level data from four public four-year institutions in North Carolina to characterize which students tend to be most impacted by tuition surcharge policies. Moreover, I observe how more intermediate early college behaviors and performance measures (e.g., major choice, credit accumulation, etc.) influence the likelihood a student may eventually be assessed the surcharge. I find that compared to their otherwise similar peers, black and Hispanic males with lower measures of pre-college achievement are more likely to be assessed the surcharge. Students who eventually hit the surcharge are also much more likely to major in a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Math) field, particularly engineering, and are more likely to formally commit to a degree path at later point in college. Last, in Chapter 3, I examine how the share of nonresident (i.e., foreign-born and out-of-state) students on public, in-state campuses affects institutional spending priorities. I employ an instrumental variables approach to isolate exogenous variation in nonresident enrollment. I find that the practical, economic effect that nonresident students have on public university spending behavior is extremely small, and often negligible. I find no effect of nonresident enrollment on total spending per FTE, suggesting that many public institutions are in fact using the additional revenues generated from nonresident tuition and fees to fill in revenue shortfalls resulting from diminished state appropriations.Doctor of Philosoph