Mindset, Mentor, and Money: How Each Influences College Success

Across society, the consistent influx of students enrolling in higher education institutions without a comparable increase in degree attainment has produced a heightened awareness and a desire to identify the factors related to influencing college success. This dissertation aims to develop a greater understanding of three potentially relevant factors and their respective influences in facilitating college success at the University of Arkansas. First, I evaluate the Student Talent Enrichment Program (STEP) Grant program, designed to fulfill low-income first-year students’ financial needs and encourage their persistence on to their second year of college. Second, I study the effectiveness of the BounceBack Mentoring program; it paired peer-mentors with first-year students on academic probation with the goal of changing each student’s academic trajectory. Third, I examine the role of non-cognitive skills, such as conscientiousness, and students’ subjective expectations about their future performance in helping themselves reach their desired goals and in turn, perform beyond their expectations. In general, my findings suggest that access to the STEP grant program neither harms nor promotes short-run outcomes. I also find that the BounceBack Mentoring program show promise in helping undergraduates who are on academic probation improve their academic performance. In addition, I find that students who possess non-cognitive skills, such as conscientiousness and grit, are actively performing beyond expectations. Such findings are important because they highlight the complications, failures, and rewards of building support systems intended to promote, encourage and facilitate student success in a heavily diverse college student population. Overall, this dissertation and its findings lends itself to the fact that facilitating college success does not come from a single source, but likely is a combination of support programs, additional resources, and internal mindsets

College Readiness, Student Expectations and Sucess: The Role of Non-Cognitive Skills

Attending college is a significant human capital investment but only about 56% of those who start college will have a completed degree 6 years later. This makes identifying which skills are associated with college success an important policy concern. We surveyed over 1,100 entering college freshmen, majoring in business and engineering at a public university in the US, and combined this information with administrative data to create a comprehensive data set that, in addition to the usual academic performance data, cognitive ability measures, and demographics, also included measures of non-cognitive skills, personality traits, and student expectations about college success. With this information we analyzed if students’ subjective expectations about their future success in college were related to non-cognitive skills and whether they are realistic, as compared to student’s performance trajectory at the end of their first year in college. Moreover, we compared student’s academic progress at the end of the first year with what would be objectively expected for them, given their background and preparation at entrance. We identify students performing below and above objective expectations and study noncognitive skills related to their objective performance. We find that non-cognitive skills are associated with academic subjective expectations of college success and objective performance in college, even after controlling for cognitive ability and time spent studying, but the relationship between specific non-cognitive skills, academic subjective expectations and academic objective performance varies across disciplines

Further Validation of Survey Effort Measures of Relevant Character Skills: Results from a Sample of High School Students

Character skills, including conscientiousness, grit or self-control are important determinants of relevant life outcomes. However, researchers struggle to find valid measures of these skills and many existing datasets lack any measures of them at all. This limits research on how these important skills could be better supported and developed. Recent research has shown the potential of parametrizations of survey effort measures as proxy measures of character skills related to conscientiousness, to either complement other collected measures or to add to datasets that lack such measures. This study provides further validation of these survey effort measures in a sample of high school students by studying their relationship with external measures reported by teachers, other direct performance task measures of related skills, high school academic outcomes, and college attendance. Our results show promise for survey effort measures to be used as proxy measures of character skills related to grit and self-control

Promises Fulfilled? A Systematic Review of the Impacts of Promise Programs

This review examines the existing evidence on the impacts of Promise Programs on community development, K-12 academic achievement, and student postsecondary outcomes. Promise Programs are place-based, guaranteed college scholarships offered to all students who graduate from a certain school or district while meeting the minimum thresholds of the program. We delineate Promise Programs by their design - whether the scholarships are available to all students, are awarded based on merit, or are awarded based on need. We also note the applicability of Promise Programs - whether the funds be used at a wide range of postsecondary institutions, or if they are narrowly targeted towards certain institutions. We find suggestive evidence that Promise Programs are successful at improving housing prices, attracting residents to Promise zones, improving student K-12 academic outcomes, and increasing postsecondary enrollment. However, the number of studies examining Promise Programs remains limited, and skewed towards particular programs

Validation of survey effort measures of grit and self-control in a sample of high school students.

Personality traits such as grit and self-control are important determinants of success in life outcomes. However, most measures of these traits, which rely on self-reports, might be biased when used for the purpose of evaluating education policies or interventions. Recent research has shown the potential of survey effort-in particular, item non-response and careless answering-as a proxy measure of these traits. The current investigation uses a dataset of high school seniors (N = 513) to investigate survey effort measures in relationship with teacher reports, performance task measures, high school academic outcomes, and college attendance. Our results show promise for use of survey effort as proxy measures of grit and self-control