Stephen L. DesJardins

University of Michigan | U-M · Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education

This paper studies the patterns of individuals’ student loan repayment for up to 12 years, tracking borrowers through the formative ages of the early 20s to the late 30s. Using social sequence and cluster analysis to understand these longitudinal repayment histories, we identify five archetypes of loan repayment that describe borrowers’ experiences...

Despite the robust literature on the effects of financial aid, the effects of financial aid loss remain largely understudied. We employ a regression discontinuity design, leveraging a minimum GPA scholarship renewal threshold, to examine the effect of losing state merit aid eligibility on college student stop-out, transfer, and bachelor’s degree co...

Background Despite efforts to increase the overall diversity of the medical student body, some medical specialties have a less diverse applicant pool based on both gender and race than would be expected based on medical graduate demographics. Objectives To identify whether women and Underrepresented in Medicine (URiM) medical students have baselin...

This article analyses the interaction between two policy areas affecting young people in England – housing and student funding. It is the first of its kind exploring a range of dynamics in the relationship between housing and student loan debt. Young people today are far less likely to own their home and are more likely to live with their parents t...

Objective: To assess mental health symptoms, suicidal ideation/behaviors, and treatment among a nationally representative probability sample of student veterans. Participants: Student veterans enrolled in post-secondary educational institutions and matched comparison students. Methods: Sampled participants completed an online survey (n = 1,838). An...

Changing Higher Education for a Changing World draws on the outcomes of the cutting-edge research programmes of the UK-based Centre for Global Higher Education, the world’s largest social science research centre focused on higher education and its future. In countries with incomes at European levels, the majority of all families now have connection...

Study objective: Women and students underrepresented in medicine are less likely to apply for residency in emergency medicine. The latter are from racial or ethnic populations that are underrepresented as physicians relative to the general population. The factors that result in lower application rates from women and groups underrepresented in medi...

Purpose Medical school admissions committees are tasked with fulfilling the values of their institutions through careful recruitment. Making accurate predictions regarding enrollment behavior of admitted students is critical to intentionally formulating class composition and impacts long-term physician representation. The predictive accuracy and po...

Introduction It is well known that insomnia is related to both depression and anxiety. However, no research has followed the course of these conditions monthly for a year. This study aimed to monitor individuals with insomnia, depression and anxiety, as well as individuals with none of these conditions in the first month, monthly, over a 12-month p...

Higher education researchers have applied increasingly sophisticated regression techniques to the study of many important issues. Historically, the statistical workhorse of this work has been linear regression, which has several desirable properties for analyzing continuous outcomes, and under certain assumptions yields unbiased coefficient estimat...

A growing number and proportion of students rely on student loans to assist with the costs of postsecondary education. Yet little is known about how first-generation students use federal loans to finance their education. In this article, we examine each of the decisions that culminate in student indebtedness: the decision to apply for aid, whether...

Purpose: In higher education, enrollment management has been developed to accurately predict the likelihood of enrollment of admitted students. This allows evidence to dictate numbers of interviews scheduled, offers of admission, and financial aid package distribution. The applicability of enrollment management techniques for use in medical educat...

Purpose In higher education, enrollment management has been developed to accurately predict the likelihood of enrollment of admitted students. This allows evidence to dictate numbers of interviews scheduled, offers of admission, and financial aid package distribution. The applicability of enrollment management techniques for use in medical educatio...

Our study adds to prior work on Indiana's Twenty-first Century Scholars(TFCS) program by focusing on whether participating in-rather than completing-the program affects the likelihood of students going to college and where they initially enrolled. We first employ binary and multinomial logistic regression to obtain estimates of the impact of the pr...

Abstract The cost of attending college has risen steadily over the past 30 years, making financial aid an important determinant of college choice for many students and a subject of concern for colleges and state governments. In this paper, we estimate the effect of rulebased merit aid assignment on students’ enrollment decisions at the University o...

Noting the benefits of mathematics in students’ future educational attainment and labor market success, there is considerable interest in high school requirements in terms of course-taking in mathematics at the national, state, and school district level. Previous research indicates that taking advanced math courses in high school leads to positive...

Noting the benefits of mathematics in students' future educational attainment and labor market success, there is considerable interest in high school requirements in terms of course-taking in mathematics at the national, state, and school district level. Previous research indicates that taking advanced math courses in high school leads to positive...

The goal of this chapter is to provide a brief introduction to one of the most rigorous nonexperimental analytical methods currently employed by education researchers: regression discontinuity.

In educational research and policy circles, college and career readiness is generating great interest. States are adopting various policy initiatives, such as rigorous curricular requirements, to increase students’ preparedness for life after high school. Implicit in many of these initiatives is the idea that college readiness and career readiness...

In this paper we analyze the impact of the Gates Millennium Scholarship program on several outcome variables using a regression discontinuity design. We find that GMS recipients have lower college loan debt and parental contributions towards college expenses and work fewer hours during college than non-recipients. We also find that GMS recipients h...

A national scholarship program provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is designed to improve access to and success in higher education for low-income high-achieving minority students by providing them with full tuition scholarships and non-monetary support. We use a regression discontinuity approach to investigate whether the receipt of th...

On November 10, 2005, then Superintendent of the Kalamazoo Public School System, Janice Brown announced—to the surprise of Kalamazoo’s residents—the beginning of the Kalamazoo Promise. Fully funded by a set of anonymous donors, the Kalamazoo Promise is an urban revitalization program that offers up to four years of free tuition to any public colleg...

This study investigates the impact that different financial aid packages have on student stopout, reenrollment, and graduation probabilities. The authors simulate how various financial aid packaging regimes affect the occurrence and timing of these events. Their findings indicate that the number and duration of enrollment and stopout spells affect...

:This study focuses on the differences in college student dropout behavior among racial/ethnic groups. We employ event history methods and data from the Beginning Postsecondary Students (BPS) and National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS) surveys to investigate how financial aid may differentially influence dropout risks among these student g...

This study investigates how the expectations of different types of financial aid affect the student college choice process from application through enrollment. We find that students from different race and income groups respond differentially to aid packages in their application and enrollment decisions depending on their levels of aid expectations...

This chapter provides readers with the conceptual and statistical underpinnings of matching methods. These methods have gained in popularity in recent years given the push to make stronger inferential statements about the impact of educational interventions and policies. Given the likelihood of nonrandom assignment into “treatments” in higher educa...

Abstract This paper uses data from the fifth cohort of the Washington State Achievers (WSA) Program to investigate the impact of receiving a WSA scholarship on various student outcomes. Using a regression discontinuity approach, we find that receipt of a WSA scholarship has a large positive and statistically significant impact on the probability of...

This paper demonstrates a formal statistical test that can be used to help researchers make decisions about alternative statistical model specifications. This test is commonly used by researchers who would like to test whether adding new variables to a model improves the model fit. However, we demonstrate that this formal test can also be employed...

Using national survey data and discrete-time logit modeling, this research seeks to understand whether student aid mediates the relationship between parental income and student dropout behavior. Our analysis confirms that there is a gap in dropout rates for low-income students compared with their upper income peers, and suggests that some types of...

This chapter demonstrates how institutional researchers at institutions of higher education can use economic theory for enrollment management. Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/50688/1/196_ftp.pdf

We jointly model the application, admission, financial aid determination, and enrollment decision process. We simulate how enrollment and application behavior change when important factors like financial aid are permitted to vary. An innovation is the investigation into the role of financial aid expectations and how they relate to application and e...

We present a multiple spells-competing risks model of stopout, dropout, reenrollment, and graduation behavior. We find that students who experience an initial stopout are more likely to experience subsequent stopouts (occurrence dependence) and are less likely to graduate. We also find evidence of the impact of the length of an initial spell on the...

Objective: To evaluate the ability of Chiropractic College Assessment Test (CCAT) to explain academic success within a chiropractic basic science curriculum. Methods: The CCAT examination was administered to 202 subjects from 1 chiropractic college on the first day of classes. Zero-order Pearson correlations were used to examine for associations...

The main objective of this study was to examine the effects of selected factors on retention, graduation, and timely bachelor's degree completion at The University of Iowa. An additional purpose was to identify the stage-varying effects of selected variables. Reflecting the sequential nature of bachelor's degree completion, this study focused on th...

Recently I purchased a new television at one of those national “superstores” that specialize in selling electronic components and durable goods like washers and dryers. As the salesperson was entering the sale information into the computer, he asked me whether I knew about the extended warranty that was available for the television I purchased. He...

This article demonstrates how to fit a statistical model to historical data, test whether the model can accurately predict enrollment out-of-sample, and use the results to segment admitted students into groups so that different recruitment and marketing interventions can be applied. Conceptual and practical issues are discussed, as well as policy c...

The Journal of Higher Education 73.5 (2002) 555-581 Graduation, especially timely graduation, is an increasingly important policy issue, and for good reason. College graduates earn twice as much as high-school graduates and six times as much as high-school dropouts (Murphy & Welch, 1993); and their wealth is two and one-half times that of a high-sc...

This study investigates the dropout behavior of college students in the United States. Previous attrition studies have typically focused on dropout at specific points in time, such as the first year of enrollment. In this study we examine the timing of dropout over a five-year period and find that factors that affect student dropout often have effe...

We use the estimates from a hazard model of college student departure to simulate how changes in financial-aid packaging affect students' departure decisions over time. We find that changing loans to scholarships, as Princeton has recently done, has a large impact on retention and that frontloading aid has a more modest impact. Our results also sug...

In this article we examine how predictive modeling can be used to study application behavior. We apply a relatively new technique, artificial neural networks, to help us predict which students are likely to apply to a large Research I institution in the Midwest. We compare the results of these new techniques to the traditional analysis tool, logist...

We detail how academic advisors at two land grand universities benefit from the identification of factors related to poor academic performance of first-year students. We used a multivariate statistical model and data from one institution to identify characteristics of students at-risk of earning low grade point averages. We showed through a second...

This study uses the National Center for Education Statistics' postsecondary transcript file of the High School and Beyond/Sophomore Cohort to replicate the findings of Adelman's Answers in the Tool Box study. We use event history modeling to provide additional information about how a number of factors affect time to bachelor's degree attainment. Us...

Policy makers often have to make decisions about how resources are to be used in furthering societal objectives. Because resources are scarce, one of the objectives that decision-makers strive for is to allocate these resources among alternative uses in an efficient manner. Another objective that public policymakers often pursue is to distribute sc...

Since 1994, enrollments of nonresident students have been declining at The University of Iowa. Since nonresident students pay over three times as much tuition as resident students, have historically comprised 35 to 40% of each fall's incoming class, and the enrollment declines are disproportionately among high-ability students, this trend is partic...

Minnesota and Wisconsin have had a tuition reciprocity agreement for about 30 years. In recent renegotiation discussions, a tuition surcharge was proposed for Wisconsin students attending the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities campus. Questions were raised about how the surcharge would affect the Twin Cities' campus freshman enrollments. This pape...

Over the past two decades as student recruitment has become increasingly important, numerous studies have examined the college choice process in an attempt to identify factors influencing students' decision making. The findings from these studies are particularly helpful for college administrators in identifying a potential pool of desirable studen...

This study uses a modeling technique often used in economics and other disciplines but rarely applied to educational research. The technique, known as event history modeling, is used to examine the temporal dimensions of student departure from a large research university. This approach allows researchers to remedy analytic problems often found when...

This study attempted to track students (n=2,077) who entered the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities campus) in 1986 but had not completed a degree at that institution within eight years of matriculation. The study utilized the Minnesota Higher Education Services Office's statewide database which allowed researchers to determine if, when, and wher...

This study used a logistic probability model to investigate the effects of variables relating student characteristics and institutional factors on the decision to apply to a large land-grant research university. The study used the entire data set from American College Testing (ACT) program test-takers in the fall of 1995 and institutional data on s...

Rather than studying the structural paths through which variables affect student persistence in education, this paper offers a reduced form model that focuses on precollege, demographic, and certain current achievement and financial aid variables. This approach does not specify structural paths, but it does have the advantage of requiring only info...

Acknowledgments:Helpful comments were provided by Josh Angrist, John DiNardo, Brian Jacob, William Shadish, the participants at the Industrial Relations & Education Research Section seminar at Princeton University, the participants at the Labor Economics seminar at M.I.T. and the participants of the N.B.E.R Higher Education Work Group. Any remainin...