Three essays on higher education outcomes

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three chapters examining issues relevant to higher education outcomes. The first essay examines the impact of state merit-aid program adoption on the stock of human capital across rural and urban populations. Using data from the 1990 and 2000 Decennial Censuses and the 2008-2012 American Community Survey, I utilize a staggered difference-in-difference methodology that exploits the exogenous variation in the timing of program adoption to produce causal estimates. Program adoption reduces bachelor's degree holders in rural counties by 1.2 percentage points. The second essay measures the impact of honors college participation on collegiate outcomes at a large, public-land grant midwestern university by leveraging strict eligibility criteria using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. For compliers near the threshold, honors participation increases first- and senior-year cumulative grade-point averages but has no statistically significant effect on persistence or graduation rates. The third essay is a descriptive analysis that measures the extent to which education-job mismatch and its consequences vary by degree field for Ph.D. recipients from a large, publicland grant midwestern university from 2011 to 2020. The study relies on a novel dataset compiled from publicly accessible sources online. Relative to other degree fields, engineering Ph.D. graduates were the most likely to work in occupations for which they were over-educated or outside of their field. There is also some evidence that mismatch may be positively correlated with occupation-level earnings.