Professor Susan Dynarski and alum Brandy Johnson (MPP ‘09) traveled to Washington, DC for the Obama Administration’s College Opportunity Day of Action on December 4, 2014. They joined President Barack Obama, the First Lady, and Vice President Biden,...
Susan Dynarski spoke with Marketplace Morning Report for a November 13 story discussing new statistics on student loan debt released by The Institute for College Access & Success (TICAS).
The cost of getting a bachelor’s degree remains on the rise,...
“The Obama administration seems intent on putting [college] ratings in place in short order,” writes Dynarski in “Why Federal College Ratings Won’t Rein In Tuition,” published in the Sunday, September 21 edition of The New York Times. “Along with...
“The Obama administration is preparing a system of college ratings that it hopes will improve college quality and hold down tuition by arming consumers with better information,” writes Susan Dynarski in The Upshot, The New York Times’ curated blog...
Student loan interest rates have risen from 3.86 to 4.66 percent this fall, and critics are arguing that the government should lower rates again or risk lower college attendance and more defaults on student debt. According to Susan Dynarski, though,...
In 2014, Susan Dynarski will serve as a nonresident senior fellow in the Brookings Institution's Economic Studies program. The Brookings Economic Studies program analyzes current and emerging economic policy issues facing the United States and aims...
As part of "Educational Pathways and Employment Outcomes of Community College Students," a major research project led by Peter Bahr, Susan M. Dynarski and Brian A. Jacob, the Education Policy Initiative (EPI) held a dialogue on Wednesday, May 7, at...
As a part of the Education Policy Speaker Series, Rodriguez, Davis, and Deane will discuss racialized policymaking that pushes back on the race-neutral framings of prevailing policy-making theories...
The National Center for Institutional Diversity invites you to attend a virtual lecture as we honor and celebrate University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor awardee Susan Dynarski.
Policy Talks @ the Ford School,
EPI Speaker Series
Join us for a conversation on modern discourse with Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom, moderated by Dr. Celeste Watkins-Hayes, as they discuss the topics in her new book, Thick, including race, gender, inequality, higher education access, technology, culture, and more.
Causal Inference in Education Research Seminar (CIERS)
The objective of the Causal Inference in Education Research Seminar (CIERS) is to engage students and faculty from across the university in conversations around education research using various research methodologies.
Causal Inference in Education Research Seminar (CIERS)
The Education Policy Initiative and the School of Education welcome Rohit Chopra, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and Susan Dynarski, professor of education, public policy, and economics at the University of Michigan, to discuss the repercussions of the $1.3 trillion dollar student loan deficit on higher education and economic inequality.
Susan Dynarski, co-director of Education Policy Initiative and Professor of Public Policy, Education and Economics at the University of Michigan, will be a featured presenter at TEDx Indianapolis. The Education Policy Initiative will host a viewing party of her livestreamed presentation. Snacks and drinks provided.
Causal Inference in Education Research Seminar (CIERS)
Free and open to the public. From the speaker's abstract: The federal Pell Grant Program provides billions of dollars in subsidies to low-income college students to increase affordability and access to higher education. In her recent research, Lesley Turner tests whether colleges respond to the Pell Grant program by altering institutional aid provided to Pell Grant recipients. Turner's findings show that, overall, 16 percent of all Pell Grant aid is passed-through to schools in the form of higher effective prices.
Sean F. Reardon, Professor of Education, Stanford University Income inequality among the families of school-age children in the US has grown sharply in the last 40 years. In this talk Dr. Reardon will describe his research findings from three studies that examine the relationship of income and income inequality to educational outcomes. The first focuses on trends in the 'income achievement gap' (the test score gap between children from high- and low-income families) over the last 50 years, using data from 13 nationally representative studies conducted between 1959-2009.
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...
Students starting at a two-year college are much less likely to graduate with a college degree than similar students who start at a four-year college but the sources of this attainment gap are largely unexplained. In this paper we simultaneously...
This paper examines the effect of marginal price on students’ educational investments using rich administrative data on students at Michigan public universities. Marginal price refers to the amount colleges charge for each additional credit taken in...
In the face of declining state support, many universities have introduced differential pricing by undergraduate program as an alternative to across-the-board tuition increases. This practice aligns price more closely with instructional costs and...
Higher education institutions play an outsized role in facilitating skill development, yet employers regularly cite a gap between the skills they need and those new college graduates possess. One explanation for this disconnect is that technological change, industrial restructuring, and international trade are continuously evolving the demand for skills in the labor market, but that investment is slow to respond. This project uses several quasi-experimental techniques, and the universe of all online job ads paired with novel data on college course-taking over the past decade, to study how...
Kevin Stange, Rodney Andrews, Scott Imberman, Michael Lovenheim
The central aim of this project is to estimate the causal effect of students’ college major choices on their postsecondary and labor market outcomes. The combination of a research design that can identify causal effects of major choice with rich administrative data that allow us to track students from high school through college and into the labor market is novel in the higher education literature and will provide new and important evidence on how college major choices affect students during college and...
This study gathers and analyzes data from qualitative interviews with high school students in Michigan. These interviews ask students to describe their college decision making process and to what extent financial aid programs or interventions were effective at influencing their postsecondary decisions. The information gathered through this project provides vital insight, directly from the student perspective, on how financial aid interventions work and who they work for. Moreover, this project sheds light on the link between postsecondary inequality and student decision-making. Finally, the...
EPI researchers and University of Michigan administrators developed and piloted the HAIL scholarship research program to attract low-income, high-achieving students to consider applying to and enrolling in the university. The project addresses three issues known to affect college application behavior among low-income, high-achieving students: uncertainty about their suitability for an elite school, over-estimates by students and parents of the net cost of college, and procedural barriers such as aid applications. The intervention targets low-income, high-achieving students in Michigan, as...
This study aims to understand student, counselor, and policy maker experiences with state financial aid programs, like the Tuition Incentive Program, and how they shape student postsecondary decisions and the affordability of postsecondary options in Michigan. Using interviews with high school students, high school counselors, college advisors, and those tasked with outreach and implementation, we will better understand multiple perspectives on state financial aid implementation and its usefulness at giving students more postsecondary choices.
We plan to talk to students and counselors...
