<p> The purpose of this study is to determine how economic factors correlate with and have an effect on enrollment at community colleges and provide benchmark enrollment strategies for use by community colleges in the future. A cluster sampling of 22 branch campus locations at 9 community colleges in Mississippi and their respective counties was selected. The independent variables used were median household income, percentage of persons below the poverty level, and unemployment rates. </p><p> A statistical correlation and regression was conducted to determine if economic factors (median household income, percentage of persons below the poverty level, and unemployment by county) had any correlation or an effect on the decrease or increase in enrollment at the respective community college campus. The correlation and statistical effect based on the regression model used demonstrated that median household income and poverty levels had the strongest correlation and the most statistically significant effect on community college enrollment in Mississippi. Unemployment had a very weak correlation and no statistically significant effect on the sample for community college enrollment for Mississippi during this period. There were some exceptions in which certain community college campuses and their respective county unemployment rates had a very high effect on enrollment for that specific campus and that specific period. </p><p> There were 6 phone interviews conducted following the analysis of the datasets to determine any internal or external causes to enrollment decreases and increases during this period. 4 of the 6 colleges responded. Of the colleges that responded, 2 saw increases and 2 saw decreases. The predominant enrollment factor denoted by the interviewee was retention and cohesive interdepartmental focus toward recruitment, which resulted in increased enrollment. Of the colleges that saw decreases and were interviewed, it was noted that enrollment personnel were not prepared for the enrollment decrease and could have been. </p><p> Target markets with higher income and lower poverty levels perform better during harsh periods of challenge for enrollment at community colleges. Increased retention and interdepartmental cohesion produces better preparation for challenging periods of declining enrollment.</p>

This dissertation is a collection of three essays that use economic tools to address policy-relevant issues related to ageing, population health, and education. The use of economic modelling and econometric analyses has the potential to provide information on the consequences and effectiveness of policy interventions in these areas and enables policymakers to make better informed decisions. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to these topics and is followed by the three essays. In Chapter 2, I analyze how providing informal care to an elderly parent affects the caregiver's labour market outcomes, cognitive ability, and health; and study the influence of the institutional background on the caregiving decision and the effects of caregiving. My results show that negative effects on labour market outcomes can be avoided by the provision of formal care alternatives, but negative effects for caregivers' mental health persist. These findings give useful insights into the optimal provision of formal care in today's ageing societies. Self-reported health measures are commonly collected in numerous surveys but might be influenced by respondents' definitions and frames of reference of health. In Chapter 3, I address the issue of response bias in population surveys by constructing an objective measure of health. I find that using a common definition of health nearly eliminates the reported health differences between the U.S. and Canada. Socioeconomic differences in health are stronger in the U.S., but remain an issue in Canada. Chapter 4 studies the effect of post-secondary education on the continued development of reading proficiency during adolescence and young adulthood. Reading proficiency is essential for labour market success in a knowledge-based economy, but little is known about how advanced reading skills such as text interpretation and text evaluation are developed. The results show that university graduation increases students' reading proficiency relative to high school graduation, which demonstrates the importance of cognitive skill investments later in the life cycle. / Thesis (Ph.D, Economics) -- Queen's University, 2014-06-19 14:07:17.682

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Economics, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Oct. 5, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-02, Section: A, page: 0646. Advisers: William Becker; Jeffrey Smith.

<p> Internships, externships, apprenticeships and co-operative education programs are all forms of experiential learning in a workplace setting that community colleges sponsor to enhance learning and career outcomes for their graduates. Previous studies have examined wage gains associated with co-op participation at the baccalaureate level, but no studies have quantified the gains to internship participation at the sub-baccalaureate level. </p><p> Guided by a framework that includes psychological and pedagogical perspectives and social, cultural and human capital theory, this study uses a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the benefits of internship and co-op programs at the sub-baccalaureate level for students and employers. Using a sample of 2,562 students provided by the Florida Education and Training Placement Information Program who graduated between 2006 and 2010, four separate statistical models analyzed the pre- and post-graduation wages for graduates of 10 occupationally-focused Associate of Science and Associate of Applied Science degree programs at community colleges in the State of Florida in order to measure the association between participation in an internship and co-op programs and wages earned in the first ten quarters after graduation. Brief cases at two of the community colleges explore in more depth the nature of the internship experience and reported benefits. </p><p> Only 14% of graduates in the sample participated in internships and 6% participated in co-ops, consistent with national averages for community college students, but well below the averages for students at the baccalaureate level. Both pre-graduation wages and internship participation are found to be significant predictors of post-graduate wages and an interaction effect exists between the two predictors. Internship participation is associated with a 10% greater increase in earnings during the 10 quarters after graduation as compared with students who do not participate in internship programs. Moreover, internships and co-op programs can be seen to help students with weaker pre-graduation wage history to partially &ldquo;catch up&rdquo; to their peers, although this &ldquo;catching up&rdquo; cannot overcome the advantage enjoyed by those students with high pre-graduation wages. </p><p> Regarding the qualitative findings, interns and employers perceive that internships provide meaningful human, social and cultural capital benefits to students which may boost their labor market success. Characteristics of successful internship programs include duration and number of hours, placement in a field consistent with a student&rsquo;s academic major, a rotational structure, active supervision, and clear communication by community college staff with interns and employers before, during and after the internship. </p><p> The findings of this study suggest that the benefits of internship sponsorship and participation outweigh the costs for students, employers and colleges. Variation in internship standards and practices across programs and institutions, however, may obscure our understanding of the outcomes described in the study and bear further investigation.</p><p>

The goal of this paper is to evaluate commonly held criticisms of the practice of ability tracking in high school mathematics. To do so, I employ data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 and follow-ups to model classroom selection and education production. This paper will focus only on the causes and effects of tracking on students who were tracked as low-ability in eighth grade. From this, we can see how many students, if any, switched out of the low-ability track by tenth grade and how various switches have affected their test scores in mathematics. I find that students exercise mobility between ability-tracks as late as tenth grade and that ability-track placement is largely determined by test scores. In addition, I find evidence that there would be minimal, if any, test score improvement among low-ability students if they were all moved to a class of heterogeneous ability. / Master of Science

This dissertation is a collection of three studies in the field of higher education. Chapter 2 evaluates the higher education tax benefits which began in 1998. This study analyzes whether the tax treatment has caused changes in the enrollment behavior among those eligible. It explores the effects on full time and part time enrollment and the effects of the rule changes in 2002 and 2003, as well as examines how marginal changes in the tax benefits affect the probability of enrollment. There is an increase in overall enrollment which can be attributed to the tax benefits, although the expansion of the program had very small effects and there were very few changes in full time student status due to the program. The second essay examines students who take a break in their schooling but return to school before beginning their careers. This can cause two separate effects; as time passes, they are growing older, maturing and learning about themselves. However, they also risk depreciation of the human capital they have acquired. This study examines these competing effects on outcomes for individuals who took time off between completing their undergraduate studies and attending law school. Results indicate that those who take time off earn higher grades on average, but that the effect on earnings is dependent on what the individual did during the schooling gap. There does appear to be a small but persistent penalty for those who have a gap in schooling. In the third essay, a model is where altruistic parents care about the bundle of goods their children consume is presented and analyzed. The model results in some empirically testable predictions, which are tested using the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS). In particular, students whose parents pay the entire cost of schooling should have a lower return to the amount invested than those who pay some of the cost themselves. However, the data show very little difference in the return to the amount invested between the two groups. / text

<p>Agricultural system in Ghana underperformed because of limited financing, which constrained some small-scale maize and cassava farmers. The purpose of this case study design was to explore the methods that some small-scale maize and cassava farmers in Amankwakrom Subdistrict used in obtaining farm financing. Two themes from the literature review were a lack of collateral for small-scale farm financing and the small-scale farmers cooperative associations? role in farm financing. Regional-scale management sustainability index formed the conceptual framework for this study. Data collection included semistructured face-to-face interviews with 8 fluent English speaking small-scale maize and cassava farmers who have obtained farm financing in the previous years. Using the Microsoft Excel and Non-numerical unstructured data indexing and theorizing software program for data analysis method, 3 major themes emerged: the farmer?s membership benefits of working in cooperative associations; farmer?s ability to provide the collateral requirements for the financial institutions; and farmer?s good loan repayment history. The study findings indicated that some small-scale maize and cassava farmers obtained farm loans because they used the cooperative associations as their collateral assets in order to satisfy for the requirements of the financial institutions. Social implications include the potential to guide the small-scale maize and cassava farmers to access farm credits to use in expanding their farm sizes. Expansion in farm sizes may result in more maize and cassava production that can help eliminate hunger and reduce poverty in the Amankwakrom Subdistrict of Ghana.

<p> Evaluating trends of historical rainfall on a weekly and seasonal basis is needed for optimizing the design and implementation of lawn water conservation strategies like outdoor water restrictions. While &ldquo;day of the week&rdquo; water restrictions are a typical strategy to limit the frequency and duration of urban lawn water use, they may not necessarily result in more conservative behaviors from end-users. Because weekly rainfall and local climate variables are seldom taken into account in water restriction strategies, they are not connected to actual lawn water demand. However, since lawn water demand is directly related to weekly rainfall totals, not to a particular number of watering days per week, water restriction schedules have the potential to unintentionally promote overwatering. This study investigated the weekly patterns of average seasonal rainfall and evapotranspiration in South Florida to determine the typical variability of weekly net irrigation needs and found that typical wet season weekly rainfall often provides a significant amount of water to meet the demand of residential lawns and landscapes. This finding underscores opportunity to reduce supplemental overwatering in residential landscapes if watering guidelines were modified to recognize seasonal average weekly rainfall in this region. </p><p> This study also tested a rainfall-based water conservation strategy to determine if providing residents with information about how local rainfall could promote more effective lawn watering behavior than just water restrictions alone. Experimental households reduced lawn water use by up to 61% compared to the control group by the end of the study. These results demonstrate that the neighborhood &ldquo;rain-watered lawn&rdquo; signs helped experimental study group households become more aware of rainfall as the primary input of water to their lawns. This study also investigated the role that lawn irrigation from self-supplied sources plays in the urban lawn water demand and investigates how the lawn water use and lawn watering behaviors of households that source from self-supply differ from those who source from the public supply.</p>

<p>This dissertation considers the relationship between peer and individual student interaction. The central finding is that self reported friends play a crucial role in individual behaviors, a role that is more significant than other students in their school. Also, using the network of friendships within a school it is possible to construct new peer effect measures and account for endogenous peer group formation. It is however important to distinguish these peer measures from unobserved individual characteristics that may also influence behavior.</p><p>The first chapter examines the effect of potentially misidentifying the reference group on peer effect estimates. The differential impact of school, grade and friend level peer effects on student decisions to smoke and drink are calculated. Friendship nominations come from the Add Health dataset, where students can list up to 10 friends from the school. The bias due to endogenous peer group formation and simulteneity are considered using various instrumenting strategies. Peer effects are found to be large and significant at the friends level for both delinquency variables. It is possible to show that misidentifying the peer group can result in peer effect estimates that are understated by as much as 40\%.</p><p>The second chapter of the dissertation further examines the role of peer interactions, this time considering the effect of popularity on student academic achievement. Recent work has found a strong positive relationship between these variables. In this chapter I ascertain the robustness of these previous findings to controls for unobserved student heterogeneity using and instrumenting technique and a structural model. The results indicate that popularity influences academic achievement positively in the baseline model. However, instrumenting for popularity or including measures of unobserved student characteristics results in a large drop in the effect of popularity, and leads to a significantly negative coefficient in the majority of cases. Interestingly, popularity influences future earnings and attitudes positively, where this effect is robust to the inclusion of unobserved type. Policy simulations where students are redistributed based on race or income indicate that the predicted number of friendships and popularity fall but academic achievement increases. Since student popularity increases happiness and earnings, the overall effect of the redistribution policies have to be considered before implementation.</p> / Dissertation

Abstract Education investment is recognized as a main factor of the economic growth at all times. The paper estimates the contribution concerning Taiwan¡¦s public education investment to economic growth, based on Lucas¡¦s endogenous economic growth theory and Johansen¡¦s statistic analysis of cointegration vector. There are 37 annual data from 1964 to 2000, measuring the price index in 1996 base year. The conclusion shows having a set of cointegration vector and long run positive equilibrium relation between education investment and economic growth. The mentioned contribution reaches up to 38¢Mhigh. Therefore, education is the most important investment for countries, also being the best choice on individual investment.