Time to Baccalaureate Degree and Post-Graduation Outcomes

About 48 percent of bachelor’s degree graduates take longer than four years to complete their degree. While earning a college degree is associated with substantial labor market benefits, the diverse paths students take towards completing their degrees may be important determinants of outcomes after graduation. Since employers routinely make inferences about a worker’s productivity based on observable characteristics such as on a resume, time to degree could be meaningful in the labor market if employers value it as a signal of an applicants’ potential performance as an employee. Moreover, the opportunity to pursue a graduate degree is an important source of the private returns to completing a college degree. Given existing racial and income disparities in graduate degree attainment rates, it is critical to understand where students may fall off the path to earning a graduate degree. Time to bachelor’s degree is an understudied point in this pipeline. In Chapter 1, I study whether the amount of time students take to complete their bachelor’s degree affects labor market outcomes after graduation using a resume-based field experiment. I randomly assign a time to degree of either four or six years, as well as the selectivity of the public colleges where the degrees were received, to fictitious resumes of recent graduates where all other resume attributes are equivalent on average. I send over 7,000 resumes to real job vacancy postings for entry-level business jobs on a large online job board and track employer response rates. In the full sample of jobs, resumes listing bachelor’s degree completion in six years received about 3 percent fewer employer responses than resumes indicating graduation in four years, but this difference is not statistically significant. However, for jobs with relatively large applicant pools, resumes listing six years to degree receive 17 percent fewer responses. Meanwhile, I estimate that listing a relatively more selective college increases response rates by about 13 percent, and by about 33 percent among higher paying jobs. Chapter 2 studies the relationship between the amount of time students take to complete a bachelor’s degree and graduate school enrollment. Using nationally representative data from the Baccalaureate and Beyond survey and taking a selection on observables empirical approach, I find large disparities in graduate school enrollment and graduate degree attainment for delayed graduates compared to on-time graduates after controlling for a rich set of student characteristics. Importantly, I show that students with a different time to degree report having similar expectations for earning a graduate degree in the future when asked during their final year of their bachelor’s degree, suggesting differential graduate school goals do not explain the results. Additional analyses find that these enrollment patterns are driven entirely by differences in full-time enrollment in graduate programs within the first year after completing the bachelor’s degree. Delayed graduates are not more or less likely to enroll in part-time graduate degree programs or to initially enroll between one and ten years after completing their bachelor’s degree

Dynamic Airspace Configuration

In air traffic management systems, airspace is partitioned into regions in part to distribute the tasks associated with managing air traffic among different systems and people. These regions, as well as the systems and people allocated to each, are changed dynamically so that air traffic can be safely and efficiently managed. It is expected that new air traffic control systems will enable greater flexibility in how airspace is partitioned and how resources are allocated to airspace regions. In this talk, I will begin by providing an overview of some previous work and open questions in Dynamic Airspace Configuration research, which is concerned with how to partition airspace and assign resources to regions of airspace. For example, I will introduce airspace partitioning algorithms based on clustering, integer programming optimization, and computational geometry. I will conclude by discussing the development of a tablet-based tool that is intended to help air traffic controller supervisors configure airspace and controllers in current operations

Configuring Airspace Sectors with Approximate Dynamic Programming

In response to changing traffic and staffing conditions, supervisors dynamically configure airspace sectors by assigning them to control positions. A finite horizon airspace sector configuration problem models this supervisor decision. The problem is to select an airspace configuration at each time step while considering a workload cost, a reconfiguration cost, and a constraint on the number of control positions at each time step. Three algorithms for this problem are proposed and evaluated: a myopic heuristic, an exact dynamic programming algorithm, and a rollouts approximate dynamic programming algorithm. On problem instances from current operations with only dozens of possible configurations, an exact dynamic programming solution gives the optimal cost value. The rollouts algorithm achieves costs within 2% of optimal for these instances, on average. For larger problem instances that are representative of future operations and have thousands of possible configurations, excessive computation time prohibits the use of exact dynamic programming. On such problem instances, the rollouts algorithm reduces the cost achieved by the heuristic by more than 15% on average with an acceptable computation time

A Method for Scheduling Air Traffic with Uncertain En Route Capacity Constraints

A method for scheduling ground delay and airborne holding for flights scheduled to fly through airspace with uncertain capacity constraints is presented. The method iteratively solves linear programs for departure rates and airborne holding as new probabilistic information about future airspace constraints becomes available. The objective function is the expected value of the weighted sum of ground and airborne delay. In order to limit operationally costly changes to departure rates, they are updated only when such an update would lead to a significant cost reduction. Simulation results show a 13% cost reduction over a rough approximation of current practices. Comparison between the proposed as needed replanning method and a similar method that uses fixed frequency replanning shows a typical cost reduction of 1% to 2%, and even up to a 20% cost reduction in some cases

An index for assessment of oral health in the edentulous population

Success or failure of prosthodontic treatment, in terms of comfort and function, is linked to tissue health. To date, no baseline indication of inflammatory status hzs been available to objectively evaluate preprosthetic tissue preparation. The Prosthodontic Tissue Index (PTI) was developed in a manner similar to periodontal indexes, to provide objective clinical evaluation of basal supporting tissueS. At the University of Michigan, 150 patients who were edentulous in one or both arches were examined and asked a series of questions relating to their prosthetic history. The inflammatory status of basal seat tissues was scored according t o defined observable inflammatory changes. Inflammation status was charted on a grid delineated by major areas of denture support for each arch. In 97% of patients examined, inflammatory changes requiring some degree of preprosthetic management were found. Tissue abnormalities other than inflammation that required specific management were noted in 62% of the patientS. Although nearly all patients registered problems relative t o their prostheses, most were not aware of the extent of their tis-sue changes. Dental care should be concerned with the preservation of health and function in the middle and older ageS. Principal epidemiological characteristics of the edentulous population showed that: most patients with complete dentures have pathologic tissue changes that require treatment; and tissue changes have little relation t o a patient's perception of denture success or personal oral health status.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73468/1/j.1754-4505.1982.tb01298.x.pd

Placement Tests, Initial Enrollments, and Student Outcomes in the Technical College System of Georgia

Institutions in the Technical College System of Georgia (TCSG) offer programs that lead to technical certificates of credit (certificates), diplomas, and associate degrees. TCSG uses tiered standards to place students into courses for these programs. The standards consist of minimum thresholds for several common skills and aptitude tests, including the ACCUPLACER, SAT, and ACT, with progressively higher standards applying to required courses for certificate, diploma, and associate degree programs. This multi-measure, tiered system is intended to ensure each student has the appropriate math and language skills to succeed in the student’s chosen program. This report from Michael D. Bloem, David C. Ribar, and Jonathan Smith analyzed how placement test results and other student characteristics are associated with students’ program choices, program completion, and post-program outcomes. It examines students who enrolled in TCSG award programs in the Fall 2013 term through the Summer 2020 term. The authors have three main findings 1. Some students are more likely to enroll in particular programs. Women, White students, older students, and students without high school diplomas have high rates of enrollment in certificate programs. Men, Black students, and economically-disadvantaged students have high rates in diploma programs. Younger and economically-disadvantaged students have high rates in associate degree programs. 2. Placement test scores are only moderately associated with program enrollments and certificate and degree program completion. 3. Initial program level is an important predictor of whether students complete a credential and what type of credential they obtain, although a plurality of students at each initial program level earns a certificat

The Effects of Minimum College Transfer Admissions Requirements within the University System of Georgia

The University System of Georgia sets minimum transfer admissions requirements for its institutions that differ with the institution’s classification as a research university, comprehensive university, state university, or state college. For the three types of universities, the requirements consist of minimum grade-point-average (GPA) thresholds that apply for students with at least 30 transferrable credits. This report studies how the minimum GPA requirements affect student transfers within the system. We find that, in many cases, these GPA requirements do influence transfer patterns. These effects are most apparent for the minimum GPA (3.2) required to transfer to the University of Georgia. Students with a GPA just above the 3.2 minimum at 30 credits are three times as likely to transfer to the University of Georgia within one year compared to students with a GPA just below 3.2. The minimum transfer GPA requirements, however, have a more distinct effect on the timing of when students transfer as opposed to whether students ever transfer to a particular institution. The report concludes with a discussion of the policy implications of these findings

Benefits Assessment of Algorithmically Combining Generic High Altitude Airspace Sectors

In today's air traffic control operations, sectors that have traffic demand below capacity are combined so that fewer controller teams are required to manage air traffic. Controllers in current operations are certified to control a group of six to eight sectors, known as an area of specialization. Sector combinations are restricted to occur within areas of specialization. Since there are few sector combination possibilities in each area of specialization, human supervisors can effectively make sector combination decisions. In the future, automation and procedures will allow any appropriately trained controller to control any of a large set of generic sectors. The primary benefit of this will be increased controller staffing flexibility. Generic sectors will also allow more options for combining sectors, making sector combination decisions difficult for human supervisors. A sector-combining algorithm can assist supervisors as they make generic sector combination decisions. A heuristic algorithm for combining under-utilized air space sectors to conserve air traffic control resources has been described and analyzed. Analysis of the algorithm and comparisons with operational sector combinations indicate that this algorithm could more efficiently utilize air traffic control resources than current sector combinations. This paper investigates the benefits of using the sector-combining algorithm proposed in previous research to combine high altitude generic airspace sectors. Simulations are conducted in which all the high altitude sectors in a center are allowed to combine, as will be possible in generic high altitude airspace. Furthermore, the algorithm is adjusted to use a version of the simplified dynamic density (SDD) workload metric that has been modified to account for workload reductions due to automatic handoffs and Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B). This modified metric is referred to here as future simplified dynamic density (FSDD). Finally, traffic demand sets with increased air traffic demand are used in the simulations to capture the expected growth in air traffic demand by the mid-term

The edentulous patient: attitudes toward oral health status

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/75662/1/j.1754-4505.1983.tb01340.x.pd