Jessica Howell

We estimate the impact of one of the largest college-to-student outreach efforts in the nation, the College Board's Student Search Service. In an oversubscribed “order”, colleges receive contact information of a randomly chosen subset of PSAT and SAT Exam takers who opted into the service and meet colleges’ search criteria from a larger set of stud...

Prior research finds that low‐income students are less likely to apply to and enroll in four‐year colleges or more selective colleges, even after controlling for academic preparation and other background characteristics. The College Board sought to reduce barriers in the college application process through a targeted campaign of brochures and e‐mai...

Colleges compete with one another for students. This article overcomes historical data limitations associated with forming a national picture of competition among colleges using the universe of SAT-takers. We identify and measure competition by the overlap within the set of colleges to which students send their SAT scores (Score Sends). We document...

In response to increased efforts to raise college completion rates through improved academic match between students and their colleges, we examine the costs and benefits to students of following such advice as well as the impact on postsecondary institutions. We analyze data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, the College Board, the...

In light of the sizeable financial and time investments associated with obtaining a postsecondary degree, the choice of where to apply and enroll should be a deliberate and thoughtful process. In this paper we exploit changes in application fees and admissions essay requirements, to demonstrate that students strongly respond to small costs in the c...

College students are taking longer to earn baccalaureate degrees now than ever before, but little is known about institutional factors that may contribute to this trend. In this paper we investigate an important institutional constraint—course scarcity—that we hypothesize may be associated with increased time to degree. We employ a unique administr...

Using a rich data set of all SAT test takers from the 2004 through 2008 high school graduation cohorts, we investigate the impact of state-specific school age-of-entry laws on students’ pathways into and through college. We document that these laws do not impact the probability that a student takes the SAT; however, we find strong evidence that stu...

This article presents a causal regression discontinuity framework for quantifying the impact of high school counselors on students’ education outcomes. To demonstrate this method, the authors used data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). Using high school counselor staffing counts and 4-year colleg...

We use a difference-in-differences analytic approach to estimate postsecondary consequences from Maine’s mandate that all public school juniors take the SAT®. We find that, overall, the policy increased 4-year college-going rates by 2- to 3-percentage points and that 4-year college-going rates among induced students increased by 10-percentage point...

This paper quantifies the extent of student-college “academic undermatch,” which occurs when a student's academic credentials permit them access to a college or university that is more selective than the postsecondary alternative they actually choose. Using a nationally representative dataset, we find that 41 percent of students undermatch in their...

This paper examines the relationship between students' need for remediation in college and the attributes of their high school. The analysis indicates reduced remediation need by students from high schools with more educated and experienced teachers, and higher remediation need by students with teachers operating on emergency credentials or waivers...

The underrepresentation of blacks in the healthcare professions may have direct implications for the health outcomes of minority patients, underscoring the importance of understanding movement through the educational pipeline into professional healthcare careers by race. We jointly model individuals’ postsecondary decisions including enrollment, co...

In this paper we investigate how participation in the Early Assessment Program, which provides California high school juniors with information about their academic readiness for college-level work at California State University campuses, affects their college-going behavior and need for remediation in college. Using administrative records from Cali...

The underrepresentation of blacks in the healthcare professions may have direct implications for the health outcomes of minority patients, underscoring the importance of understanding movement through the educational pipeline into professional healthcare careers by race. We jointly model individuals’ postsecondary decisions including enrollment, co...

This research examines the determinants of the match between high school seniors and postsecondary institutions in the United States. I model college application decisions as a nonsequential search problem and specify a unified structural model of college application, admission, and matriculation decisions that are all functions of unobservable ind...

It is a common misperception that low teacher recruitment is the cause of the current teacher shortage in the United States. Research over the past decade suggests, however, that the source of the shortage is high levels of staffing fluctuations driven by teacher attrition. This paper examines the factors underlying teacher attrition decisions in o...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Virginia, 2004. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 100-109).

The number of homeschooled children grew by 7-15 percent each year during the 1990s with the result that today as many as 2 million children are currently being educated at home in the United States. Despite this dramatic increase, homeschooling has received surprisingly little attention from economists. In this paper, we briefly discuss homeschool...