Document Author: Sara Goldrick-Rab

Managing to Make It: The College Trajectories of Traditional-age Students with Children (2011)

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.

Putting College First: How Social and Financial Capital Impact Labor Market Participation Among Low‐Income Undergraduates (2011)

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.

Accountability for Community Colleges: Moving Forward (2010)

Recent calls for increased investments in postsecondary education
have been accompanied by demands for greater accountability from
colleges and universities. It is politically difficult in a time of scarce
resources to allocate new funds without requiring measurable outcomes
in return. At the same time, effective accountability systems in education
are rare. Therefore, in this chapter I consider the potential for successfully
framing and enacting accountability frameworks for community
colleges. I argue that the usual approach to accountability requires substantial
reform if it stands any chance of succeeding in this sector, but
that success is possible and likely.

Work-First or Work-Only: Welfare Reform, State Policy, and Access to Postsecondary Education (2003)

As a result of the 1996 welfare reform-Temporary Aid
to Needy Families (TANF)-the number of welfare
recipients enrolled in postsecondary education has
decreased dramatically.T he new welfare law also gives
states significant discretion to support and even promote
postsecondary education for low-income adults; consequently,
state policies regarding access vary widely. This
study uses qualitative data from three states to examine
the sources and consequences of state variation in access
to postsecondary education for disadvantaged individuals.
Our cross-state comparison shows that competing
ideas about welfare, work and the role of education in
the lives of welfare recipients help structure and shape
political debates, and policy outcomes, in the each of the
states. Ideas influenced policies via four key channels:
the state human service agency; advocacy organizations;
the persistence of the “work-first”id ea within implementationp
rocesses; and the power of policy “signals”to
drive state welfare reform

Higher Education in Wisconsin: A 21st Century Status Report (2010)

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.

The Community College Effect Revisited: The Importance of Attending to Heterogeneity and Complex Counterfactuals (2012)

Community colleges are controversial educational institutions, often said to simultaneously expand college opportunities and diminish baccalaureate attainment. We assess the seemingly contradictory functions of community colleges by attending to effect heterogeneity and alternative counterfactual conditions. Using data on postsecondary outcomes of high school graduates of Chicago Public Schools, we find that enrolling at a community college penalizes more advantaged students who otherwise would have attended four-year colleges, particularly highly selective schools; however, these students represent a relatively small portion of the community college population, and these estimates are almost certainly biased. On the other hand, enrolling at a community college has a modest positive effect on bachelor’s degree completion for disadvantaged students who otherwise would not have attended college; these students represent the majority of community college-goers. We conclude that discussions among scholars, policymakers, and practitioners should move beyond considering the pros and cons of community college attendance for students in general to attending to the implications of community college attendance for targeted groups of students.

Improving the Productivity of Education Experiments (2012)

Given scarce resources for evaluation, we recommend
that education researchers more frequently conduct
comprehensive randomized trials that generate evidence
on how, why, and under what conditions interventions
succeed or fail in producing effects. Recent experience
evaluating a randomized need-based financial
aid intervention highlights some of our arguments and
guides our outline of the circumstances under which
the examination of mechanisms and heterogeneous impacts
is particularly important. Comprehensive experiments
can enhance research productivity by increasing
the number of theories both tested and generated and
can advance policy and practice by exploring the conditions
under which interventions will bemost successful
in scale up. Paradoxically,while the emphasis on average
treatment effects is typically associated with efficiencyminded
economists, we argue that the approach is often
inefficient from the standpoints of science and policy.

Working for College: The Causal Impacts of Financial Grants on Undergraduate Employment (2016)

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.