Although in-person college access programs can be effective, less is known about whether low-cost and scalable virtual interventions achieve the same benefits. We evaluate two variants of a counseling program. Students randomly assigned to program felt more supported applying applied broadly four-year colleges, but were not likely accepted or enroll. analyze rich extensive survey data explore m...

I analyze how two reforms, introduced to expand college access in Brazil, impacted enrollments of low-SES students. The first policy centralized applications a nationwide platform (SISU), and the second expanded affirmative action quotas (AA) uniform share 50 percent vacancies offered by degree. Results show that SISU changes enrollment decisions high-SES students, crowding out groups from leas...

In 2012, Brazilian public universities were mandated to use affirmative action policies for candidates from racial and income minorities. We show that the policy makes students’ status a strategic choice may reject high-achieving minority students while admitting low-achieving majority students. Empirical data shows evidence consistent with this type of unfairness in more than 49 percent progra...

School education in Germany is under the responsibility of the federal states and as a consequence average grades differ widely across regions. Since school leavers apply nationwide for admission to university, regional provenance may thus matter a lot for the success probability in the admission process. Using a comprehensive dataset of the German central clearing house for university admissio...

State Merit-based Financial Aid Programs and College Attainment We examine the effects of recently adopted state merit-based financial aid programs on college attendance and degree completion. Our primary analysis uses microdata from the 2000 Census and 2001-2010 American Community Survey to estimate the effects of merit programs on educational outcomes for 25 merit aid adopting states. We also...

Time-to-Degree and the Business Cycle When students themselves enjoy large degrees of freedom in determining the duration of their studies, it results in a fairly large degree of interindividual variance in terms of time-todegree. This paper investigates individual time-to-degree in a model where students determine the optimum time-to-degree whilst weighing up the cost against the consumption b...

In recent decades, many universities have been moving in the direction of a more hierarchical and centralised structure, with top-down planning and reduced local autonomy for departments. Yet the management literature over this period has stressed the numerous benefits of flatter organisational structures, decentralisation and local autonomy for sections or departments. What might explain this ...

Blotched snakehead virus (BSNV) is a member of the Birnaviridae family that requires a virally encoded protease known as VP4 in order to process its polyprotein into viral capsid protein precursors (pVP2 and VP3). VP4 belongs to a family of serine proteases that utilize a serine/lysine catalytic dyad mechanism. A mutant construct of VP4 with a short C-terminal truncation was overexpressed in Es...