More Like this

1. The Impact of Offering Baccalaureate Degrees on Institutional Enrollment in Community Colleges

   https://doi.org/10.1177/00915521221125500  

   Wright-Kim, Jeremy (January 2023, Community College Review)

   Objective: The community college sector plays a vital role in broadening access to education and helping states meet their workforce needs. An emerging trend and potential lever to better achieve these goals is the community college baccalaureate or CCB. Yet, opponents wonder whether CCBs may lead community colleges to abandon their traditional logics. This study attempts to help address this question. Methods: Using institution-level panel data, I employ various difference-in-difference approaches to estimate the impact of CCB adoption on overall enrollment levels, as well as the enrollment of historically underrepresented student populations. Results: I find that CCB adoption leads to significant increases in overall student enrollment; these results are robust to alternative specifications and control groups. Yet, enrollment-related impacts vary by selected student populations. I find no consistent evidence that CCB adoption shifts community colleges away from their commitment to underrepresented students, though there may be a tipping point not yet reached by current levels of CCB adoption. Contributions: These findings have important implications for policy and practice as institutional leaders and policy makers continue to debate, adopt, and implement baccalaureate programing at the community college level. 

   more » « less
2. The interesting case of special and extraordinary items: What are they and how do they influence municipal government finances?

   https://doi.org/10.1111/pbaf.12357  

   Ke, Laiyang; Jimenez, Benedict S (June 2024, Public Budgeting & Finance)

   One‐shot revenue shocks influence government budget decisions and service provision. However, how governments respond to transitory income remains a theoretical and empirical puzzle. The permanent income hypothesis posits that governments save windfalls to smooth expenditures, while other models predict spending increases. Empirical findings are inconclusive as the focus has been on revenues that are not truly transitory. The case of special and extraordinary gains allows us to investigate the effects of transitory resources. Taking advantage of the Governmental Accounting Standards Board's requirement that governments report such gains in their financial statements, this study examines the effects of gains on expenses for a sample of cities across 10 years. Using a staggered adoption event study design, we find that gains stimulate spending and that the size of gains matters before one observes the stimulatory effects. These results have substantial implications for budgetary transparency and fiscal sustainability in municipal governments. 

   more » « less
3. Does Money Matter More in the Country? Education Funding Reductions and Achievement in Kansas, 2010–2018

   https://doi.org/10.1177/2332858420963685  

   Rauscher, Emily (July 2020, AERA Open)

   null (Ed.)

   The U.S. Department of Education made recent technical changes reducing eligibility for the Rural and Low-Income School Program. Given smaller budgets and lower economies of scale, rural districts may be less able to absorb short-term funding cuts and experience stronger negative achievement effects. Kansas implemented a state-level finance change (block grant funding) after 2015, which froze district revenue regardless of enrollment and reduced funding in districts where enrollment increased. Difference-in-differences models compare achievement before and after block grant implementation to estimate effects of funding cuts separately in rural and nonrural districts. Between-state and within-state comparisons offer complementary identification strategies in which the strengths of one approach help address limitations of the other. Revenue/spending reductions are similar by geography but represent a larger fraction of rural district budgets. Results indicate that revenue reductions have larger implications for achievement in rural areas, where they represent a larger proportion of the total budget. 

   more » « less
4. Impacts of COVID-19 lockdowns and stimulus payments on low-income population’s spending in the United States

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256407  

   Li, Kangli; Foutz, Natasha Zhang; Cai, Yuxin; Liang, Yunlei; Gao, Song (September 2021, PLOS ONE)

   Yang, Chaowei (Ed.)

   The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted the economy and human lives worldwide, particularly the vulnerable low-income population. We employ a large panel data of 5.6 million daily transactions from 2.6 million debit cards owned by the low-income population in the U.S. to quantify the joint impacts of the state lockdowns and stimulus payments on this population’s spending along the inter-temporal, geo-spatial, and cross-categorical dimensions. Leveraging the difference-in-differences analyses at the per card and zip code levels, we uncover three key findings. (1) Inter-temporally, the state lockdowns diminished the daily average spending relative to the same period in 2019 by $3.9 per card and $2,214 per zip code, whereas the stimulus payments elevated the daily average spending by $15.7 per card and $3,307 per zip code. (2) Spatial heterogeneity prevailed: Democratic zip codes displayed much more volatile dynamics, with an initial decline three times that of Republican zip codes, followed by a higher rebound and a net gain after the stimulus payments; also, Southwest exhibited the highest initial decline whereas Southeast had the largest net gain after the stimulus payments. (3) Across 26 categories, the stimulus payments promoted spending in those categories that enhanced public health and charitable donations, reduced food insecurity and digital divide, while having also stimulated non-essential and even undesirable categories, such as liquor and cigar. In addition, spatial association analysis was employed to identify spatial dependency and local hot spots of spending changes at the county level. Overall, these analyses reveal the imperative need for more geo- and category-targeted stimulus programs, as well as more effective and strategic policy communications, to protect and promote the well-being of the low-income population during public health and economic crises. 

   more » « less
5. Building a Sense of Community for Freshman Civil Engineering Students

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--36762  

   Marti, Erica; Khan, Eakalak; Gajurel, Amit; Tugadi, Neil Christian (July 2021, 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)

   Across the country, less than two-thirds of engineering students persist and earn a degree in engineering. A considerable amount of research on the topic has been conducted, leading to a few key ideas on why students leave engineering. In particular, disinterest in the curriculum, a limited sense of belonging, perception of inadequate academic ability, and disconnect between learning style and instruction mode are some reasons that students depart engineering. Consequently, many first-year programs aim to address one or more of these issues. The ABC program at XXX seeks to improve undergraduate civil engineering and construction management education, as well as increase retention and graduation by specifically focusing on students and curriculum in the first two years of the civil & environmental engineering and construction management (CEEC/CM) programs. Retention and graduation rates are on the lower side of national averages; therefore, faculty at the institution are taking the lead and making changes within the department. One aspect of the program is community cohesion building (CCB), where first-year students create connections, engage in community and engineering design projects, and gain exposure to CEEC/CM professions. Specific objectives are to increase the sense of learning community among students and between students and faculty, as well as increase retention in the first two years. Through biweekly meetings, participants in CCB build connections with freshman CEEC/CM peers, upper level CEEC/CM undergraduate students, CEEC graduate students, and CEEC/CM faculty. Participants also engage in the engineering design process and compete in a national engineering design challenge geared toward freshman and sophomore students. This paper describes the first one-and-a-half years of CCB implementation of a five-year grant. We present the program structure, challenges, changes, and successes. This information should prove useful to other institutions who are in the process of implementing new first-year programs, especially for institutions who have similar characteristics (i.e., urban setting, commuter school, highly diverse, high proportion of first generation students). Program evaluation focuses on the following items related to CCB objectives: 1) increase in sense of belonging as measured by an increase in social networks (tool: student survey), and 2) increase in CEEC/CM retention between freshman/sophomore and sophomore/junior years (tool: institutional data). 

   more » « less