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Educational loan defaulting is a problem increasing on a worldwide scale. In Malaysia, the default rate is almost 50% in the case of loans advanced to students in higher education. With this in mind, for the first time, this study analyses this chronic problem in-depth with consideration to primary data collected from a cross-section of students currently studying in public universities in Malaysia. With help from the Theory of Planned Behaviour, the empirical analysis establishes that loan defaults are influenced by a complex interaction of personal-, social- and psychology-related variables: students’ attitude, intention to repay loan, parental influence, perceptions that loan repayment will affect quality of life after graduation, perceptions towards loan agreement, and an awareness of loan repayment issues created by the media. This study succeeds in disentangling the precise impact of such variables in regard to loan defaults. The findings are of great relevance to government-funding agencies, which can better plan the loan advancement and recovery process once they understand the true reasons behind defaults. The novel method utilised for the first time with the objective to study the default issue should also be useful to academic researchers seeking to conduct similar studies in the context of other countries. This study should also assist policy makers in planning long-term strategies in terms of assessing, designing and evaluating new loan schemes. Developing countries, such as Malaysia, face competing demands on their limited financial resources. An increase in the recovery rate will bring in funds that can be lent to additional students or used for strengthening educational infrastructure. These measures add useful value to the social and economic set-up of the country.

This thesis describes a program of research designed to investigate longitudinally the role of debt in a cohort of 1232 final-year New Zealand secondary school students, their tertiary entry decisions and their attitudes towards tertiary education and student debt. It follows some of these students into their first year out of school into tertiary education or otherwise. Two surveys were conducted that employed the Attitude to Debt Scale (Davies and Lea, 1995) to address students’ debt and savings behaviour and estimates, tertiary education entry decisions, and attitudes to tertiary education and term-time working. Debt attitudes are found to be more complex than previously proposed, and this has significant ramifications for debt attitude theory and research. Longitudinal comparisons suggest students’ views regarding debt necessity does not change but their attitude to avoiding does. Students become more or less avoidant of debt depending on their circumstances. However, debt attitude results still support many of the findings of earlier research such as debt acquisition preceding a more tolerant attitude change. Debt and tertiary education attitudes are not well predicted. Students report engaging in term-time working to limit their student loans, but engaging in term-time working results in lower grades in their studies. Those from the middle and higher socio-economic classes are more likely to be positive towards tertiary education, and thus entrants, compared with the lower socio-economic classes. However, the results do not suggest this is due to debt attitudes or fear of debt.

The transition in South Africa has meant that institutions of higher learning have become much more inclusive spaces of many kinds of people who historically found it difficult to access them. In attempting to achieve this inclusion, the state and institutions of higher learning have recognised that inclusion is not simply the removal of racial exclusions. It also requires support for students who in practice cannot take up their studies due to particular constraints. One response has been the establishment of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) which offers financial aid in loans and bursaries to students who cannot afford to study. In the case of students with disabilities, a further form of support is important, namely the state disability grant. NSFAS is effective at ameliorating not only the financial constraints of studying, but also the social and academic barriers that are specific to students with disabilities. The disability grant serves as a general source of income to pay for general expenses, to supplement NSFA funding or to be saved for emergencies. While literature exposes the income, educational and geospatial inequalities between disabled and non-disabled people over history, it highlights the financial, academic, social and structural barriers that disabled students face at university. The research highlights why people with disabilities are the ‘deserving poor’ of development and social assistance. With development being understood as the improvement of well-being or living standards, this research explores the role of the disability grant not as social assistance in alleviating poverty, but as social assistance that is developmental. Thus, just as NSFAS redresses the problems of affordability and disability in higher education, the disability grant needs to improve penetration and expansion to people with chronic illnesses, in order to avoid exclusion errors in the interdepartmental network on poverty reduction. / Thesis (M.Dev.Studies)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2013.

This thesis describes a program of research designed to investigate longitudinally the role of debt in a cohort of 1232 final-year New Zealand secondary school students, their tertiary entry decisions and their attitudes towards tertiary education and student debt. It follows some of these students into their first year out of school into tertiary education or otherwise. Two surveys were conducted that employed the Attitude to Debt Scale (Davies and Lea, 1995) to address students’ debt and savings behaviour and estimates, tertiary education entry decisions, and attitudes to tertiary education and term-time working. Debt attitudes are found to be more complex than previously proposed, and this has significant ramifications for debt attitude theory and research. Longitudinal comparisons suggest students’ views regarding debt necessity does not change but their attitude to avoiding does. Students become more or less avoidant of debt depending on their circumstances. However, debt attitude results still support many of the findings of earlier research such as debt acquisition preceding a more tolerant attitude change. Debt and tertiary education attitudes are not well predicted. Students report engaging in term-time working to limit their student loans, but engaging in term-time working results in lower grades in their studies. Those from the middle and higher socio-economic classes are more likely to be positive towards tertiary education, and thus entrants, compared with the lower socio-economic classes. However, the results do not suggest this is due to debt attitudes or fear of debt.

Greater access to education for many South Africans is inextricably linked to the development of the country and its collective ability to deal with the many socio– economic challenges it presently faces. The availability of financial aid at Higher Education Institutions to support financially needy and academically deserving students as part of a comprehensive programme to address the need for skills development, socio–economic backlogs and imbalances that exist in the country is supported by various Government Departments, private donors and Higher Education Institutions. Financial Aid Offices responsible for the distribution of both public and private donor funding, face various challenges at South African universities in their endeavours to render quality service and prompt service delivery to their clients, the students who are the recipients of this funding. The present study attempts to identify the most important service quality dimensions relevant to effective and efficient service delivery in the Financial Aid Office at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. Furthermore, this study aims to assess the performance of the Financial Aid Office to provide possible recommendations with a view to improving service delivery at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. Against this background, the primary objective of this study is to measure financial aid students’ perceptions of service quality with a Financial Aid Office at a Higher Education Institution and estimate the effect these perceptions have on service delivery. All bursary and loan awardees from 2008, that is, only students who were successful in their financial aid applications for 2008, were invited to collect and complete a questionnaire at the Financial Aid Office at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. v The measuring instrument used was a self-administered, structured questionnaire divided into two sections. Section A measured service quality perceptions of the Financial Aid Office of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University and Section B measured personal data of the respondents. A total of 500 questionnaires was distributed of which 228 were returned, yielding a final sample of 204 that could be statistically analysed. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse the empirical results. Overall, the results show that respondents were, by and large, satisfied with the service rendered by the Financial Aid Office at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. Thus, perceptions of the five service quality dimensions measured in this study were favourable, implying that respondents did not have any major problems with the present service offering of the Financial Aid Office. It is important to note that while these results indicate favourable perceptions of service quality of the Financial Aid office at one point in time, they will not necessarily be permanent. The Financial Aid Office must therefore ensure that it continues to build on this valuable strength. Specifically, the Financial Aid Office should continue delivering this level of quality of service and concentrate on improving the service quality of the items in the questionnaire with the lowest mean scores. Service quality is an important construct and needs to be assessed in Financial Aid Offices to ensure the desired outcome of producing more graduates, especially from financially needy and academically deserving backgrounds. Students, as customers, deserve the best service, as they would expect from any other service provider such as a bank or a supermarket. The strengths of this Financial Aid Office can serve to assist other universities in providing a positive student experience through the delivery of a quality service.

Magister Educationis - MEd / Cost-sharing is neither a new subject nor a recent practice in the financing of students’ higher education in Zimbabwe. The practice of cost-sharing in Zimbabwe’s higher education dates back to the colonial period. Unlike those African countries that have historically had free higher education, in Zimbabwe cost-sharing has always been part of its higher education financing formulae. As a result, whereas the challenge in other African countries has been to shift from free higher education to cost-sharing, the challenge in Zimbabwe has been that of moving from one cost-sharing model to another. While Zimbabwe has experimented with various cost-sharing strategies, literature on the country’s experiences with the practice is limited. This study fills the knowledge gap by identifying and accounting for the shifts in the conception and practice of cost-sharing in the financing of students’ higher education in Zimbabwe. Consistent with the study’s focus on describing and understanding historical processes (shifts in cost-sharing policy over time) in higher education financing in Zimbabwe, a qualitative approach was adopted to gather and analyze data. In particular, the study used an historical research design to identify and account for the policy shifts in higher education financing in Zimbabwe from 1957 to 2009. The scope of the study was limited to student funding in the public university sector. The study used documents as the major sources of data, while interviews and focus group discussions with key actors in higher education financing in Zimbabwe provided additional data to validate data generated from document sources. The study demonstrates that Zimbabwe adopted cost-sharing in higher education financing at the very point of inception of the first university in the country, the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which is now the University of Zimbabwe in 1957. Starting (in 1957) with a deferred tuition fee policy that was complemented by a mortgage type loan system and government grants, a confluence of global, national and local forces combined in specific fashion in specific historical epochs over time to ‘negotiate’ and ‘renegotiate’ the student funding models. It is further shown that during the colonial era, while the cost-sharing model rode on the back of a favourable Government loan and grant system aimed at promoting access to higher education, the racist basis of colonial education policies created bottlenecks that severely curtailed access to higher education by the majority black population. Colonial education policy iii regimes deliberately limited the feeding streams into university enrolments by black students, resulting in a proportional mismatch between the number of white students entering university and that of black students. Thus, during the colonial era, access to higher education was largely a function of the ‘barrier’ system in African education that defined inequality between whites and Africans. Independence in 1980 saw the new socialist government embracing the loan and grant based cost-sharing model and further implementing radical measures to democratize access to education. However, the increase in student numbers and in higher education institutions, coupled with poor loan recovery, and the ascendancy of neoliberalism at about the turn of the twenty-first century presented serious challenges to the state’s capacity to adequately fund higher education. In the process, the loan and grant system declined gradually and was eventually replaced by an upfront tuition fee policy that took a toll on access to higher education. Noting the inadequacies of policy interventions through the introduction of the Cadetship Scheme, the ‘successor’ to the loan and grant system, the study recommends the resuscitation of the loan system. It is however, important that such reintroduction of the loan system be predicated on the development of a robust framework that ensures that loans are allocated to students who are in real financial need and that there is in existence, effective and efficient loan recovery machinery.

Financial aid policies are widely used to foster access to higher education for low–income and underrepresented students. Prior research has documented the positive impacts of these programs on the outcomes of the students it intents to help (e.g., Mello, 2021; Londoño-Velez et al., 2020; Bleemer, 2021a; Black, Denning, & Rothstein, 2020). However, how the influx in the number of low–income and underrepresented students at selective institutions shape student outcomes is a somewhat overlooked aspect. Increasing the number of low–income and underrepresented students may come at the cost of reducing the overall academic performance of the group (Arcidiacono et al., 2015). Moreover, it could also lead to social segregation between wealthy and low–income and underrepresented students within the institution. This is an undesirable outcome, if we take into account the increasing evidence on the importance of social membership and networks for employment and overall social mobility (Marmaros & Sacerdote, 2002; S. D. Zimmerman, 2019; Michelman et al., 2021; Rivera, 2016).This dissertation starts by addressing two questions. First, what are the consequences of in- creasing the presence of low–income students at an elite college on students’ academic achieve- ment? And second, can this form of desegregation lead to more interactions between low–income and traditionally privileged students? To answers these questions, I focus on an Elite University in Colombia which experienced a large influx in its enrollment of low–income students, due to the implementation of a large financial aid program known as Ser Pilo Paga (SPP). The program induced plausibly random variation in the shares of low–income students within cohorts and across majors, which I use to examine how the changes in peers’ composition impacted the traditionally privileged students attending this elite institution. In the first chapter of this dissertation, I use administrative data from the Elite University and document how the influx in the share of low–income students led to significant achievement gaps between wealthy and low–income students. Then, I use a difference–in–difference research de- sign to examine the effect that this influx in low–income peers had on wealthy students academic performance and persistence. Overall, my results indicate the influx in low–income peers had no impact on the academic performance of the students traditionally attending this institution. Peer effects estimations suggest that the relatively low academic performance of low–income students had no impact on wealthy students. These findings complement those from Bleemer (2021a), who find college re–segregation has no impacts on the academic performance of White and Asian stu- dents. My results are also consistent with K–12 evidence showing desegregation policies have no impact on the students traditionally attending the desegregated schools (Angrist & Lang, 2004). In the second chapter, I examine whether the influx in the share of low–income peers at the Elite University led students to diversify their social interactions. I complement the administrative data and research design from the previous chapter with administrative records on students’ co– movements across campus captured by turnstiles located at all entrances. To validate the turnstile– elicited interactions, I use secondary survey data on social networks from a sub–sample of students at Elite University. The 9.5 percentage points average increase in the share of low–income peers at an entry cohort–major led wealthy students to double their connections with low–income peers. At least half of the increase in interactions between wealthy and low–income students, however, is explained by interactions of wealthy students with low–income but high–achieving students. These results suggest students diversify their interactions primarily among students with similar academic achievement levels. In the last chapter, I focus on a broader aspect of financial aid policies, and examine how student loans impact college and employment outcomes. In this chapter, my co–author and I are particularly interested in understanding the monetary returns to increasing investments in college education through student loans. To do so, we focus on a nation–wide student loan program in Colombia known as ACCES that covered 75 percent of the tuition cost for low–income students, and exploit rich administrative data to assess the impact of the loan. Importantly, the cost of tuition per semester is fixed for full–time students, regardless of the number of credits they take. The eligibility to the loan increased college enrollment by 9.6 percentage points, the number of semesters attained in 1.76 semesters, and college graduation in 15.4 percentage points. We also find evidence suggesting students with the loan had salaries 13 percent higher six years after high school graduation. To shed light on how student loans can lead to better salaries, we estimate the returns to additional college investments as captured by the marginal increase in college semesters found among loan recipients. We estimate a return to the additional college semester of 3.5 percent of the average daily salary. Sub–group analyses suggest much of the return to the additional semester of college is driven by college completion. This chapter contributes to the literature that has examined how relaxing credit constrains can have positive impacts on long–term outcomes by increasing human capital investments (e.g., Black, Denning, Dettling, et al., 2020; Cameron & Taber, 2004).

Higher education is a means to improve professional status and economic mobility; however, mounting college debt has become a hindrance to college graduates, primarily African Americans. A disproportionate number of these graduates incur significant debt while attending college. The purpose of this descriptive phenomenological study was to understand the lived experiences of African American college graduates who were managing debt incurred to pay for their education. Human capital theory and critical race theory provided the conceptual framework. Two research questions motivated this study: How do African American college graduates living in the state of Georgia manage their college debt? What role does college debt play in the career and financial choices of African American college graduates who reside in the state of Georgia? Data collection included semistructured interviews with 20 participants. Data analysis was hand coded to identify 3 themes: pursuit of financial independence, education would improve participants' financial position, and college debt is a burden. A college education has been viewed as the way to improve socioeconomic standing, however, the cost of this education can result in student loan debt that burdens graduates' ability to acquire financial growth, thereby reducing the effect of achieving a college education. Recommendations consisted of two potential areas of improvement: mandatory financial aid counseling for students before high school graduation, and an expansion of the exit interview process for prospective graduates from colleges and universities. Results may contribute to positive social change by enhanced decision-making among college students and their families before graduation, and to improved financial counseling techniques, research methods, and debt decision capabilities.

The following study was undertaken because there was a need to establish whether training information at a local guarantor was relevant to employees and clients. Utilizing transformative learning theory, the purpose of this case study was to explore what the guarantor's employees and management require for new account advisors by conducting open-ended interviews with the guarantor's employees. The guarantor's director secured collections contracts and a long-term enrollment advising contract with a new online university. For the guarantor to have trained account advisors, managers must know what kind of training is necessary. Secondly, the university enrollment is growing, and that could necessitate more advisors to address the increase in student population. During the data collection phase, 9 guarantor employees participated in interviews. The guarantor's managers and employees were asked what training the guarantor requires of new account advisors, what training new hires need, and what training methods should be employed. Thematic coding, content analysis, and triangulation were used to analyze the data. Themes from the results included participatory training, experience required, and customer service. Based on the data analysis, a position paper was created to recommend role-playing, shadowing, and other training methods. The recommendations were made to ensure training and learning are ongoing, relevant to the assigned tasks, and that the guarantor's managers ask clients to play an active role in account advisor training. Social change can be achieved with a more engaged management, a staff armed with relevant knowledge and support, improved skillsets, and a guarantor that can better respond to client needs.