Memo issued to research field.
NSC responded here: https://nscresearchcenter.org/workingwithourdata/notesfromthefield-3/
Washington State’s independent analysis: https://erdc.wa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/NSC-Paper.pdf
A book based on a project co-lead by Nancy Kendall and Sara Goldrick-Rab with support from the William T. Grant Foundation.
Systematically examines all key areas of the costs of college; Creates a framework for analyzing college cost impact on student well-being, thus supporting direct policy intervention; Includes data drawn from 18 months of ethnographic research in Wisconsin
Students with children are a growing presence in higher education, but apart from being labeled “nontraditional” their prospects for degree completion are poorly understood. How does parenting while in college make students vulnerable? How does it make them stronger? To address these questions this exploratory study draws on a panel study of young, low-income Wisconsin college students that includes administrative, survey, and interview data. Findings suggest that while parenting students have divergent college pathways compared to their peers, those pathways do not always indicate disadvantage. At the same time, it is also clear that they would benefit from additional supports.
Most undergraduates work despite evidence that working while in college is associated with lower
rates of degree completion. Prior research indicates that the propensity to work varies by both family
income and education, suggesting that both financial and social capital operate to reduce work and
preserve educational advantage. We test that hypothesis with a sample of 3,000 low‐income
Wisconsin undergraduates enrolled in the state’s 42 public two‐year and four‐year colleges and
universities. Leveraging an experiment that distributes financial aid via lottery, we identify effects of
financial capital on labor force participation that are comparable in magnitude to the positive benefits
of social capital obtained through parental education. Specifically, the allocation of additional financial
aid reduces the hours worked by low‐income students with high school‐educated parents to the point
that it nearly fully offsets the socioeconomic advantage (in terms of fewer hours worked) that accrues
to students from college‐educated families. Need‐based financial aid, it appears, may be an equalizer
that promises to reduce labor force participation and enhance college attainment.
Wisconsin is at a crossroads. Even before the recent economic crisis, the state was lagging
behind our peers in Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa in population growth, per capita income,
and the share of the population with more than a high school education. Without a significant
investment in education, Wisconsin will continue to fall further behind not only our peers in the
Midwest, but the nation as a whole.
One way in which financial aid is thought to promote college success is by minimizing the time students
spend working. Yet, little research has examined if this intended first-order effect occurs, and results
are mixed. We leverage a randomized experiment and find that students from low-income families in
Wisconsin offered additional grant aid were 5.88 percentage points less likely to work and worked 1.69
fewer hours per week than similar peers, an 8.56% and 14.35% reduction, respectively. Students
offered the grant also improved qualitative aspects of their work experiences; they were less likely to
work extensively, during the morning hours, or overnight. Grant aid thus appears to partially offset
student employment, possibly improving prospects for academic achievement and attainment.