Research

Showing 1 - 25 of 93 results

EPI Policy briefs

Public School Funding, School Quality, and Adult Crime

July 14, 2022

Jason Baron, Joshua Hyman, Brittany Vasquez

Given the large costs of crime to society, there is substantial policy interest in identifying effective crime-prevention strategies. Many studies have focused on the effects of increasing the size of the police force and on the effects of tougher...

EPI Policy briefs

Understanding the Psychosocial Effects of the Flint Water Crisis on School-Age Children in Michigan

May 19, 2022

Sam Trejo, Gloria Yeomans-Maldonado, Brian Jacob, Samuel Owusu

In early 2016, the Flint Water Crisis captured national attention; major news outlets reported that the city’s tap water had been contaminated with lead since April of 2014. While Flint residents alerted officials about the changes to their drinking...

EPI Working papers

Public School Funding, School Quality, & Adult Crime

March 1, 2022

Jason Baron, Joshua Hyman, Brittany Vasquez

This paper asks whether improving the quality of public schools can be an effective long-run crime-prevention strategy in the U.S. Specifically, we examine the effect of school quality improvements early in children's lives on the likelihood that...

EPI Working papers

College Majors and Skills: Evidence From the Universe of Online Job Ads

December 1, 2021

Steven Hemelt, Brad Hershbein, Shawn Martin, Kevin Stange

We document the skill content of college majors as perceived by employers and expressed in the near universe of U.S. online job ads. Social and organizational skills are general in that they are sought by employers of almost all college majors,...

Two students walking on a college campus

EPI Policy briefs

Preschool for All: A Strong Start for Washington State’s Children

October 1, 2021

Christina Weiland, Tim Burgess, Ajay Chaudry, Ruth Kagi, Anna Shapiro, Casey Moran

Washington State has an early childhood crisis roiling almost invisibly across the state, with many children not receiving the strong and fair start in life they need and deserve. This crisis has life-long implications for children because early...

EPI Policy briefs

The Pandemic's Effect on Demand for Public Schools, Homeschooling, and Private Schools

September 1, 2021

Tareena Musaddiq, Kevin Stange, Andrew Bacher-Hicks, Joshua Goodman

The COVID-19 pandemic drastically disrupted the functioning of U.S. public schools, potentially changing the relative appeal of alternatives such as homeschooling and private schools. Using student-level administrative data from Michigan and...

Teacher and students in class wearing masks

EPI Working papers

The Pandemic's Effect on Demand for Public Schools, Homeschooling, and Private Schools

September 1, 2021

Tareena Musaddiq, Kevin Stange, Andrew Bacher-Hicks, Joshua Goodman

Other reports

Historic Crisis, Historic Opportunity: Using Evidence to Mitigate the Effects of the COVID-19 Crisis on Young Children and Early Care and Education Programs

June 1, 2021

Christina Weiland, Erica Greenberg, Daphna Bassok, Anna Markowitz, Paola Guerrero Rosada, Grace Luetmer, Rachel Abenavoli, Celia Gomez, Anna Johnson, Brenda Jones-Harden, Michelle Maier, Meghan McCormick, Pamela Morris, Milagros Nores, Deborah Phillips, Catherine Snow

The COVID-19 crisis has brought unprecedented challenges to the high-quality early care and education (ECE) experiences that are essential for young children to thrive. Throughout the pandemic, early childhood policymakers had to quickly make...

EPI Policy briefs

Increasing Economic Diversity at a Flagship University

April 1, 2021

Jasmina Camo-Biogradlija, Susan Dynarski, Katherine Michelmore, Nicole Wagner Lam, Stephanie Owen

Research shows that low-income students face unique barriers to applying to colleges. The HAIL (High Achieving Involved Leader) study at the University of Michigan (U-M) explored whether providing an early, four-year guarantee of free tuition and...

EPI Policy briefs

Effects of COVID-19 on Early Childhood Education Centers

March 1, 2021

Christina Weiland, Paola Guerrero Rosada, Anne Taylor, Louisa Penfold, Catherine Snow, Jason Sachs, Meghan McCormick

This brief is part of an ongoing study that is tracking implementation of the Boston Universal Prekindergarten (UPK) expansion, including effects of the COVID-19 crisis on UPK community-based centers. We use administrative and interview data to...

Parent walking two children to school with masks on

EPI Policy briefs

Applications for Financial Aid Lagging Among Low-Income Students

August 1, 2020

Sabrina Solanki, Kevin Stange, Orlando Sanchez Zavala, Catherine Brown

Applications for federal and state financial aid for college are a leading indicator of how many students will enroll in and complete a college degree. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and the Tuition Incentive Program (TIP), a...

Other reports

Dual-Credit Courses and the Road to College: Experimental Evidence from Tennessee

March 1, 2020

Susan Dynarski, Steven Hemelt, Nathaniel Schwartz

Dual-credit courses expose high school students to college-level content and provide the opportunity to earn college credits, in part to smooth the transition to college. With the Tennessee Department of Education, we conduct the first randomized...

EPI Policy briefs

Findings on Boston Prekindergarten Through Early Elementary School

October 1, 2019

Christina Weiland, Anna Shapiro, Rebecca Unterman, Hirokazu Yoshikawa

This brief summarizes findings from the Sustaining the Boost project, an Institute of Education Sciences-funded study of the Boston Public Schools prekindergarten program. We extended what is known about the program in four different recent...

EPI Working papers

When do the Literacy Skills of Preschool Attenders and Non-Attenders Converge? Evidence from Boston

October 1, 2019

Christina Weiland, Anna Shapiro, Rebecca Unterman

Attending preschool improves children’s kindergarten readiness, but the cognitive outcomes of preschool attenders and non-attenders tend to converge partially or fully in elementary school. In older programs, most of the non-attender “catch up”...

EPI Working papers

Closing the Gap: The Effect of a Targeted, Tuition-Free Promise on College Choices of High Achieving, Low-Income Students

December 1, 2018

Susan Dynarski, Katherine Michelmore, Stephanie Owen, CJ Labissi

Low-income students, even those with strong academic credentials, are unlikely to attend a highly selective college. With a field experiment, we test an intervention to increase enrollment of low-income students at the highly selective University of...

The University of Michigan's Hail Scholarship

EPI Working papers

School Finance Reforms, Teachers' Unions, and the Allocation of School Resources

June 1, 2018

Joshua Hyman, Eric Brunner, Andrew Ju

School finance reforms caused some of the most dramatic increases in intergovernmental aid from states to local governments in U.S. history. We examine whether teacher unions affected the fraction of reforminduced state aid that passed through to...

EPI Working papers

Nudges, College Enrollment, and College Persistence: Evidence from a Statewide Experiment in Michigan

May 1, 2018

Joshua Hyman

I conduct a statewide experiment in Michigan with nearly 50,000 high-achieving high school seniors. Treated students are mailed a letter encouraging them to consider college and providing them with the web address of a college information website. I...

EPI Working papers

Estimating the Effects of a Large Network of Charter Schools Managed by a For-profit Operator

March 1, 2018

Susan Dynarski, Daniel Hubbard, Brian Jacob

In this paper, we leverage randomized admissions lotteries to estimate the impact of attending a National Heritage Academy (NHA) charter school. NHA is the fourth largest for-profit charter operator in the country, enrolling more than 56,000...

Student walking down a hallway at school

EPI Working papers

Vocational and Career Tech Education in American High Schools: The Value of Depth Over Breadth

September 1, 2017

Daniel Kreisman, Kevin Stange

Vocational education is a large part of the high school curriculum, yet we have little understanding of what drives vocational enrollment or whether these courses help or harm early careers. To address this we develop a framework for curriculum...

Student completing a metalworking project

EPI Working papers

The Effect of Labor Market Information on Community College Students' Major Choice

April 1, 2017

Brian Jacob, Rachel Baker, Eric Bettinger, Ioana Marinescu

An important goal of community colleges is to prepare students for the labor market. But are students aware of the labor market outcomes in different majors? And how much do students weigh labor market outcomes when choosing a major? In this study...

EPI Working papers

Getting Student Financing Right in the US: Lessons from Australia and England

March 1, 2017

Susan Dynarski, Nicholas Barr, Bruce Chapman, Lorraine Dearden

The US student loan system is currently in crisis. US graduates owe $1.3 trillion in student loans; seven million borrowers are in default and even more are in arrears. The impact on borrowers is catastrophic. We argue that this is mainly due to the...

EPI Working papers

The Changing Federal Role in School Accountability

January 30, 2017

Brian Jacob

This is a point / counterpoint. The goal of the article is to discuss the influence of school accountability policies on educational inputs (e.g., funding, teacher quality, instructional practices, and school organization) as well as outputs (e.g.,...

EPI Working papers

Price Regulation, Price Discrimination, and Equality of Opportunity in Higher Education: Evidence from Texas

December 1, 2016

Kevin Stange, Rodney Andrews

This paper assesses the importance of price regulation and price discrimination to low-income students' access to opportunities in public higher education. Following a policy change in the state of Texas that shifted tuition-setting authority away...

EPI Working papers

Measuring Instructor Effectiveness in Higher Education

December 1, 2016

Brian Jacob, Kevin Stange, Pieter De Vlieger

Instructors are a chief input into the higher education production process, yet we know very little about their role in promoting student success. This is in contrast to elementary and secondary schooling, for which ample evidence suggests teacher...

EPI Policy briefs

K-8 Choice in Michigan: Practices and Policies within Charter and Traditional Public Schools

December 1, 2016

Susan Dynarski, Brian Jacob, Mahima Mahadevan

Many view public and charter schools as vastly different school settings, but research rarely compares charter schools to the traditional public schools that students would likely otherwise attend. What are the different policies that affect...

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