Robert Kelchen's research while affiliated with The University of Tennessee Medical Center at Knoxville and other places
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Publications (40)
This study draws on a comprehensive performance-based funding (PBF) dataset and up-to-date difference-in-differences econometrics to examine the impacts of specific policy features (e.g., share of institutional revenue at stake and equity metrics) on college access and selectivity. We find suggestive evidence that increases in the share of revenue...
A growing number of states use performance-based funding (PBF) systems to tie appropriations to student outcomes. Yet while many studies have examined the effects of PBF on enrollment and completion outcomes, no research has considered whether PBF affects post-college outcomes. This is of particular importance as more states directly incentivize co...
Performance-based funding (PBF) policies are an increasingly common way for states to tie funding for public colleges and universities to student outcomes. Yet amid growing concerns about student debt, the potential exists for PBF to affect student debt and ability to repay loans in both intended and unintended ways. In this paper, we use the first...
The study examines the impact of various types of performance-based funding (PBF) policies on institutional resources across postsecondary institution types. Although 41 states have implemented PBF over time, the design and dosage of PBF policies look very different across PBF-adopting states. We leverage multiple quasi-experimental approaches and...
Postsecondary institutions’ responses to COVID-19 are a topic of immediate relevance. Emergent research suggests that partisanship was more strongly linked to institutions offering in-person instruction for Fall 2020 than was COVID-19. Using data from the College Crisis Initiative and a multiple group structural equation modeling approach, we teste...
States provide substantial support for higher education through appropriations to public colleges and universities that can be used to maintain relatively low tuition levels and funds for financial aid. Higher education often receives disproportionate cuts during recessionary periods, and it faces potentially unprecedented reductions in coming year...
This study draws upon the first detailed longitudinal dataset on performance-based funding (PBF) to document the evolution and current landscape of PBF in American higher education. We show that while PBF has become increasingly common, states have experimented with adopting, abandoning, and re-adopting PBF over time. We also find a new wave of PBF...
Performance-based funding (PBF) policies with research incentives have grown in popularity over the years despite little understanding regarding whether they actually work. This study leverages a novel national data set to examine the impact of PBF research incentives on the research expenditures and total state appropriations among public 4-year i...
While previous research on higher education policy diffusion often conceptualizes diffusion as occuring across neighboring governments, we conceptualize policy diffusion as also occuring across pairs of governments (dyads) regardless of geographic proximity. We apply both conceptualizations and use survival analysis techniques to examine factors as...
State funding for public higher education institutions plays a crucial role in supporting college access and completion, particularly among students from historically underrepresented groups. Unlike school funding formulas in K-12 education, little is known about the full set of states’ mechanisms to allocate funding to colleges. In this paper, we...
This brief offers a detailed overview of how states and higher education systems allocate funding to public colleges and universities and how funding mechanisms have changed over time. We find growth in the number of “hybrid” funding models that incorporate enrollment, performance, and/or prior year allocation (base+) considerations in both the two...
Many public universities have sought to increase the number of students they enroll from other states, with the assumption that a larger share of nonresident students increases institutional revenues and prestige. In this paper, I examine the extent to which out-of-state undergraduate student enrollment shares are associated with changes in per-stu...
For decades, the federal government has expected vocationally-focused programs in higher education, especially among for-profit colleges, to lead to gainful employment in a profession. In the mid-2010s, the U.S. Department of Education developed gainful employment (GE) regulations that sought to tie a program's federal financial aid eligibility to...
Institutional responses to COVID-19 are a topic of much concern. Emergent research has suggested that politics and polarization was more strongly linked, than was COVID-19, to institutions engaging in-person instruction for Fall 2020. This study used Structural Equation Modeling to test this trend. Based upon political polarization and dependency,...
Institutional responses to COVID-19 are a topic of much concern.
Emergent research has suggested that politics and polarization was more strongly linked, than was COVID-19, to institutions engaging in-person instruction for Fall 2020. This study used Structural Equation Modeling to test this trend. Based upon political polarization and dependency,...
This systematic synthesis examines the intended and unintended consequences of performance-based funding (PBF) policies in higher education. Within this synthesis, we focus particularly on evidence from research studies with strong causal inference designs in an effort to understand the impacts of these policies. PBF adoption is generally associate...
Policymakers have been debating the Bennett Hypothesis—whether colleges increase tuition after the federal government increases access to student loans—for decades. Yet most of the prior research has focused on studying small changes to loan limits or Pell Grants for undergraduate students. In this study, I examine whether business schools (the mos...
We conduct the first long‐term experimental evaluation of a need‐based financial aid program, the privately funded Wisconsin Scholars Grant. Over multiple cohorts, the program failed to increase degree completion and graduate school enrollment up to 10 years after matriculation. The program did reduce time‐to‐degree for some students and modestly i...
Objective: An increasing number of states are adopting performance-based funding (PBF) systems for their public colleges, but there are concerns that PBF dissuades colleges from recruiting and enrolling students with a lower likelihood of success. Some states have attempted to address this concern by providing additional funds for successfully serv...
Whether colleges increase tuition in response to increased federal student loan limits (the Bennett Hypothesis) has been a topic of debate in the higher education community for decades, yet most studies have been based on small increases to Pell Grant or undergraduate student loan limits. In this paper, I leverage a large increase in graduate stude...
As state governments seek to improve the performance of institutions of K–12 and higher education, they often adopt educational policies that have similar names but different characteristics across states and with variations over time within states. Yet quantitative analyses generally examine the absence or presence of an educational policy instead...
In order to demonstrate the value of higher education and evaluate the effectiveness of various policies and practices, researchers are increasingly expected to merge data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) with a range of other federal and private‐sector data sources. In this article, I detail a number of the most impo...
Public colleges and universities have sought to recruit and enroll more students from outside their home state in an effort to both enhance institutional prestige and generate additional revenue from the higher tuition rates than nonresident students generally pay. A body of research has shown that nonresident students tend to be more economically...
More states are using performance-based funding (PBF) systems in an effort to incentivize public colleges to operate more effectively. Responding to concerns about equity, states are also adopting provisions that encourage colleges to serve more students who at risk of not completing college. In this paper, I examine whether PBF policies in general...
An increasingly important goal of state policymakers is to keep young, well-educated adults to remain in that state instead of moving elsewhere after college, as evidenced by New York’s recent move to tie state grant aid to staying in state after graduation. We used American Community Survey data from 2005–2015 to examine the prevalence of intersta...
The growth of the public discourse on college completion and student debt has pushed policymakers
and institutional leaders to implement a variety of policies aimed at incentivizing student completion.
This article examines state-adopted excess credit hour (ECH) policies on student completion
and median debt outcomes. Using a quasi-experimental app...
The federal government holds colleges accountable if too many of their students default on loan repayment, but the default measure traditionally used captures only a fraction of students who are struggling to repay their loans. The 2015 College Scorecard dataset introduced a new loan repayment metric, showing that the percentage of students who hav...
Discussions of college costs often focus on tuition and fees, but living cost allowances for room, board, and other expenses account for more than half of the total cost of attending college. The allowances, developed by colleges and universities, also affect student eligibility for federal financial aid and the accuracy of accountability systems....
A meta-analysis was conducted to examine gender differences in the effects of early childhood education programs on children’s cognitive, academic, behavioral, and adult outcomes. Significant and roughly equal impacts for boys and girls on cognitive and achievement measures were found, although there were no significant effects for either gender on...
Income inequality in educational attainment is a long-standing concern, and disparities in college completion have grown over time. Need-based financial aid is commonly used to promote equality in college outcomes, but its effectiveness has not been established, and some are calling it into question. A randomized experiment is used to estimate the...
The concept of competency-based education (CBE), in which some or all of a student's progression through a degree program is separated from the traditional credit hour model, has gained popularity in the last few years. However, little research has examined the types of students who enroll in CBE programs and whether CBE results in cost savings for...
Student fees make up 20% of the total cost of tuition and fees at the typical four-year public, yet little research has been conducted to examine institutional-level and state-level factors that may affect student fee charges. I use panel data to find that institutional selectivity and athletics spending do not influence student fee levels. However...
Two federal campus-based financial aid programs, the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant (SEOG) and the Federal Work-Study Program (FWS), combine to provide nearly US$2 billion in funding to students with financial need. However, the allocation formulas have changed little since 1965, resulting in community colleges and newer institutions ge...
The persistently low college attainment rates of youth from poor families are partly attributable to their uncertainty about college affordability. The current federal financial aid system does not provide specific information about college costs until just before college enrollment and the information is only available to students completing a com...
The persistently low college attainment rates of youth from poor families are partly attributable to their uncertainty about college affordability. The current federal financial aid system does not provide specific information about college costs until just before college enrollment and the information is only available to students completing a com...
We examine the likely implications of switching from a prior year (PY) financial aid system, the current practice in which students file the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) using income data from the previous tax year, to prior-prior year (PPY), in which data from two years before enrollment is used. While PPY allows students to ga...
We examine the impacts of a private need-based college financial aid program distributing grants at random among first-year Pell Grant recipients at thirteen public Wisconsin universities. The Wisconsin Scholars Grant of $3,500 per year required full-time attendance. Estimates based on four cohorts of students suggest that offering the grant increa...
Citations
... Вместе с тем в некоторых докладах отмечается, что опыт финансового кризиса 2008 г. показывает, что пандемия будет иметь отсроченный эффект на объемы государственного финансирования [Estermann et al., 2020a;Rosinger et al., 2022]. ...
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... Проблема фінансової стійкості закладів вищої освіти є відносно новою і недостатньо дослідженою в науковій спільноті, більшість публікацій є дотичними. Основними викликами XXI століття з якими стикнулися університети, Khahro S., Javed Y. [ [5] досліджують фінансування на основі показників ефективності (PBF) із врахуванням груп студентів та визначають їх вплив на розподіл коштів. Chebeň J. та ін. ...
... Character teaches students about the challenges they will face in the future as well as the proper attitude they should have. Therefore, in the digital transition age, it is considered crucial to colaborate between characters and insight into the future world's reality (Dumont & Ready, 2020;Hu, Ortagus, Voorhees, Rosinger, & Kelchen, 2022;Kraus et al., 2021). So, it can be explained that the character internalization of students becomes crucial. ...
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... The onset of the pandemic in early Spring 2020 only partly disrupted specialized curriculum efforts as most orientation curricula had already concluded by March, leaving administrators focused on shifting specialized instruction for first-year residential students to an online modality in conjunction with all other university courses during campus closures. As the pandemic persisted into the Fall 2020 semester, orientation and specialized instruction for first-year students shifted entirely to online, but with many institutions re-opening their campus in the Fall of 2021, classes for residential students largely returned to an in-person modality in part or whole (Carrasco, 2021a;Collier et al., 2021). ...
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... One way that amenities enhance prestige is through their influence on enrollment outcomes, such as selectivity of the student body (Winston, 2000). Enrollment strategy is often two pronged, with one goal to support tuition strategy and the other to support prestige (Kelchen, 2019). Aspects of student body profiles, such as average SAT score and class rank, as well as outcomes of the admissions process, such as selectivity, are explicitly included in the formulas used to generate rankings or categorize institutions in leading college guidebooks (Volkwein & Sweitzer, 2006). ...
... Even so, there are general approaches to how states fund public institutions (Layzell 2007). States typically fund public higher education with either one or a combination of an enrollment model (state bases funding on student enrollment levels), a base-plus model (state increases or decreases funding for all institutions by a similar percentage from year to year), or a PBF system (state bases funding on student outcomes, such as credit hour completion, persistence, and completion) (Lingo et al., 2021). Some states pair their PBF and enrollment formulas with hold-harmless or stop-loss protections, which allows public institutions in a given state to have some stability (and avoid extreme funding cuts) via a baseline level of protected funding from year to year. ...
... When the data on the GE rules were collected and made available to the public in 2017, it indicated that more than 800 programs would not meet the new standards-98% of them were for-profit institutions (Arbeit & Horn, 2017). Research also finds evidence that enrollment in for-profit colleges declined (Fountain, 2019) and poor-performing ones were closed (Kelchen & Liu, 2022) in response to the GE rules. As a current status, the U.S. Department of Education has proposed imposing new GE rules in January 2022. ...
... Subsequent research has confirmed that politics, especially party affiliation, played an important role in institutional decision-making. Studies from Collier et al., (2020Collier et al., ( , 2021 and Felson and Adamczyk (2021) indicate that states with either a Republican governor or a Republican-controlled legislature were more prone to reopen for in-person instruction. ...
... Government support of these public institutions has shifted from fully funded to partially funded, to what an increasing number of institutions are currently experiencing, performance-based funding (Wise, 2021). In an effort to pressure universities to combat drop-out rates and increase student retention, funding is now based on performance criteria such as student enrollment, graduation rates, and job placement rates (Li et al., 2018;Ortagus et al., 2020;Ortagus et al., 2021;Rosinger et al., 2020). Such initiatives attempt to incentivize universities to increase student retention and graduation rates (Li et al., 2018). ...
... There has been a proliferation of need-based aid programs attaching merit-based requirements to financial aid as incentives to improve student success (Anderson et al., 2020). While the need-based component of these programs helps more disadvantaged students to get access to higher education, the goal of merit-based requirements is to increase the efficiency of student aid by raising student effort and performance. ...
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