92 research outputs found
Academic Performance and Behavioral Patterns
Identifying the factors that influence academic performance is an essential
part of educational research. Previous studies have documented the importance
of personality traits, class attendance, and social network structure. Because
most of these analyses were based on a single behavioral aspect and/or small
sample sizes, there is currently no quantification of the interplay of these
factors. Here, we study the academic performance among a cohort of 538
undergraduate students forming a single, densely connected social network. Our
work is based on data collected using smartphones, which the students used as
their primary phones for two years. The availability of multi-channel data from
a single population allows us to directly compare the explanatory power of
individual and social characteristics. We find that the most informative
indicators of performance are based on social ties and that network indicators
result in better model performance than individual characteristics (including
both personality and class attendance). We confirm earlier findings that class
attendance is the most important predictor among individual characteristics.
Finally, our results suggest the presence of strong homophily and/or peer
effects among university students
Income-Tested College Financial Aid and Labor Disincentives
Working has become commonplace among college students; however, this activity can have unexpected financial consequences. Federal formulas implicitly tax the amount of financial aid students are eligible to receive by as much as 50 cents for each marginal dollar of income. This tax creates an incentive for college students to reduce income, though abstruse formulas and the timing of financial aid receipt are likely to limit responses. Using data from a national sample of financially independent college students in the United States, I do not find that students bunch below earnings protection thresholds in a manner that would indicate attempts to avoid reductions in financial aid in total or grants specifically. Moreover, I do not find evidence that implicit income taxes predict lower earnings in a manner that suggests that students meaningfully reduce earnings in response to the tax. Therefore, while economically efficient, the reduction in aid has the potential to burden low-income students who need to both work and receive financial aid in order to afford college expenses
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