Through a grant with the Institute of Education Sciences, AIR's Lynn Mellor and Jason Lee are examining the implementation and outcomes associated with Texas’s enactment of a statewide policy requiring students to complete a financial aid application as a high school graduation requirement. The study aims to learn how districts are supporting students and parents regarding completing college financial aid applications and how this may lead to increased college enrollment for Texas high school students.

In 2022, Ascendium will launch an open Request for Proposals (RFP) aimed at addressing gaps in evidence for strategies that support rural learners from low-income backgrounds in earning degrees and credentials with labor market value. Through this RFP, Ascendium has committed funding for 8-10 projects, employing a diverse mix of research methods and subjects, that respond to one or more overarching research question themes. To optimize the design, implementation, and cross-project learning potential of this initiative, Ascendium awarded a grant to AIR to serve as an intermediary partner to support RFP design, grant management, and synthesis of insights across the funded multi-faceted research efforts.

The project seeks to determine the differential cost of providing an equal educational opportunity to community college students from different backgrounds to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board in order to support legislative policy debate surrounding reform of the public community college funding system in Texas. To determine the cost, the team at AIR is conducting a cost function analysis to estimate the cost of generating outcomes of community college students in Texas. 

AIR, in collaboration with Quality Education for Minorities and the Kapor Center, is examining learning environments that enable undergraduate students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to thrive and subsequently attain doctoral degrees in science and engineering (S&E). The goals of the study are to (a) identify unique characteristics of S&E learning environments at the 21 HBCUs ranked as top producers of Black baccalaureate degree recipients who earn S&E doctorates (“anchor institutions”), (b) identify HBCUs that have similar characteristics as the anchor institutions and have a high potential to graduate students who go on to earn doctoral degrees, and (c) develop and disseminate a model that builds HBCU capacity to produce graduates who go on to earn S&E doctorates. Click here to access the project website.

To improve equity in access, AIR will utilize US Census Data to examine the characteristics of veterans eligible for the Post- 9/11 GI Bill (PGIB) who do not use it (“GI Bill skippers”). AIR will then build on the above analysis to do a deeper dive on why veterans with characteristics of particular interest to the foundation (e.g., students of color) or particular combinations of characteristics from the factor analysis (e.g., women of color with dependents), did not use their benefits. By collecting and analyzing additional qualitative interview data from these groups, AIR could identify needs as well as policies and practices that might help veterans with these characteristics use their PGIB benefits and pursue postsecondary education going forward.

Using New Jersey Education to Earnings Data System (NJEEDS) within the Coleridge Initiative platform, the American Institutes for Research conducted a comparative analysis of earnings outcomes for degree completers who transferred, stopped out, or did neither— whom we refer to as “traditional”—on the way to their degree. The study highlights interesting patterns in degree completers’ labor market outcomes based on their path to their degree. It suggests that as long as students complete their degree, stopping out or transferring does not negatively affect earnings.

Postsecondary administrators interested in serving parenting adult learners (PALs) need to know more about them and the supports they need in their pursuit and completion of postsecondary credentials. This project leverages data from an AIR survey of adult learners and one-on-one interviews with a subset of parenting adult learners to answer three key questions: 1) What factors contribute to PALs’ decisions to enroll in college? 2) What do the academic experiences of PALs look like? and 3) What supports and resources do PALs use and want? Building on a broad research base on the experiences of parenting students, results from this research shed light on the particular experiences of adult learners with children and point to ways practitioners and policymakers can better align programs and resources to this student population.

AIR created an online tool that allows users in Florida to view the return on investment associated with completing a degree from a particular state institution, in a particular major, at a particular level. The tool incorporates data from multiple sources, including statewide completion data, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, and Gallup. AIR also produced a report describing the earnings outcomes for college completers of different levels of degrees in different majors from Florida institutions, as well as discussing student debt levels and job growth information. The goals of the project were to present the state’s educational outcome data in a way that makes it easy for users to compare and make decisions about their educational path.

AIR is working with five open- and broad-access institutions across Texas to conduct a randomized controlled trial that assigns students to either corequisites or traditional developmental education courses and then compares 3-year outcomes in terms of course success, persistence, and degree completion. The goal of the study is to better understand the impact and implementation of corequisite courses in Texas community colleges.

AIR conducted an analysis of student pathway choices through college and the extent to which they relate to successful degree completion and transfers from 2- to 4-year institutions. The aim of this research was to investigate and understand low college completion rates.