Do Expenditures Other than Instructional Expenditures Affect Graduation and Persistence Rates in American Higher Education?
Social Science Research Network, 2009
229 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Median instructional spending per full-time equivalent (FTE) student at American colleges and universities has grown at a slower rate the median spending per FTE in a number of other expenditure categories during the last two decades. We use institutional level panel data and a variety of econometric approaches, including unconditional quantile regression models, to analyze whether noninstructional expenditure categories influence first year persistence and graduation rates of American undergraduate students. Our most important finding is that student service expenditures influence graduation and persistence rates and their marginal effects are larger for students at institutions with lower entrance test scores and more lower income students. Put another way, their effects are largest at institutions that have lower current persistence and graduation rates. Simulations suggest that reallocating some funding from instruction to student services may enhance persistence and graduation rates at those institutions whose rates are currently below the medians in the sample.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Education, Safety Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1b80786c4f5d6261d6e177a86149cdd779cd431a
Citations in the corpus
- Improving Measurement of Productivity in Higher Education (2013, unknown): “Prior research shows that standard outcome measures (graduation and persistence rates, for example) are related to variables such as entry test scores and family income (Webber and Ehrenberg, 2010).”
- Performance-Based Funding in American Higher Education: A Systematic Synthesis of the Intended and Unintended Consequences (2020, unknown): “…access to flagship public universities and other well-resourced, selective public colleges, which creates a negative feedback loop given that institutional resources are strongly associated with student success, particularly for historically underrepresented students (Webber & Ehrenberg, 2010).”
- Quantile Regression: Analyzing Changes in Distributions Instead of Means (2015, unknown): “Webber and Ehrenberg (2010) use IPEDS Finance and Completions data to estimate and compare the effect of instructional, academic support, research, and student services expenditures on institutional 6-year graduation rates.”