Why is the U.S. college graduation rate so low? An examination of the changing role of family structure across student cohorts
Abstract: While access to college among U.S. youth expanded markedly from the 1970s to today, the rate of graduation among those who enrolled in college remained near 50 percent. This paper documents the changing family circumstances of U.S. college students, and their relationship to students’ patterns of college attendance and graduation using the 1979 and 1997 cohorts of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). While 30 percent of the 1979 cohort’s college students came from families with non-traditional structures, by the 1997 cohort, half of students who ever enrolled in college were from non-traditional families. My empirical models of graduation probability show that students who experienced family disruptions before age 18 in the 1979 cohort are just 3 percentage points less likely to graduate from college than those who lived with both of their biological parents up to age 18. However, this gap increased to 9 percentage points for the 1997 cohort. A decomposition exercise based on the estimates demonstrates the share of the change in completion rates that the model attributes to the various observed explanatory variables, particularly to the change in family structure. Results indicate that students' characteristics and family background account for 45 percent of the change in graduation rate, with family structure accounting for 12 percent of the change in graduation rate. The central contribution of this analysis shows the importance of the family structure in explaining changes in college completion over the past 30 years in the United States.
Whom does the FAFSA favor? Quantifying the gap between EFC and ACF for students from divorced families
Each year, 14 million households seeking federal aid for college complete a detailed questionnaire about their finances, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). Based on the FAFSA, "need" is defined as the difference between the Cost of Attendance (COA) and the Expected Family Contribution (EFC), an estimate of how much the family can pay out of pocket for college. For students from divorced families, provided that the parent with whom the student lives (the custodial parent) is the one filling out the FAFSA, if any existing stepparent is married to the custodial parent at the time that the student fills out the FAFSA, the student must report the stepparent’s income and assets. The question I ask is, do stepparents meet the FAFSA-prescribed EFC? If not, what is the gap between the EFC (Expected Family Contribution) and the AFC (Actual Family Contribution)? There are two specific cases I investigate in this project. The first case is one in which a stepparent does not contribute to the student’s college study. In this case, the student’s financial aid will be negatively affected by the presence of the stepparent. This implies the student’s true, underlying need is more than the calculation based on the FAFSA. The second case happens when the custodial parent and stepparent meet the EFC, while the biological parent also makes financial transfers to the child while studying in college, which means the student receives more college financial aid than existing need formulas, using an accurate measure of family support, would prescribe. This ongoing project first points out the potential problem in the FAFSA form for students from divorced families and evaluates the proportion of FAFSA applicants who are affected by this problem. Second, it will quantify the gap between EFC (Expected Family Contribution) and AFC (Actual Family Contribution) for those students affected. With an understanding of the magnitude of the mismatch between ability to pay for college and college financial aid prescribed by the FAFSA among children of divorced parents, and of the prevalence of this situation in the college-going population, I will be able to evaluate proposed FAFSA modifications that account for a more contemporary range of U.S. family structures.
Moving beyond enrollment: The effect of parental transfers on college access, persistence, and graduation
In this paper, I focus on students who enroll in college, and their sources of college financial support over the course of a student’s academic career. The 1997 cohort of the NLSY includes detail on college funding drawn from grants, loans, work, and family. In duration models of time spent in college, I estimate the dependence of college persistence on sources of college funding, including funding from family members. The preliminary results demonstrate that students from different family structures exhibit different propensities to stop out, reenroll, drop out, and graduate. By and large, the findings in this paper point to a stronger connection between financial support from parents and college persistence for students from nontraditional families than for students from traditional families. This analytic approach is a contribution to the literature because first it provides additional detail about student flows in and out of college, in particular how parental transfer is associated with these temporal events. Second, in the context of the literature, this may suggest more meaningful college financial constraints for children from nontraditional families.