How Money Helps Keep Students in College: The Relationship between Family Finances, Merit-based Aid, and Retention in Higher Education

In this paper, we leverage detailed, individual-level student data to understand the relationships between family finances, merit-based aid, and first-year student retention. With three cohorts of student data that comprise family financial status, institutional merit scholarships, and many of the other known correlates of student retention, we regress sophomore retention of first-time, full-time students on the financial variables with controls. We find that an increase in a family’s ability to contribute to educational costs improves a student’s chances of retention. Additionally, our data show that institutional financial assistance also bolsters the likelihood that students return for their sophomore year

The role of previous military service in American electoral politics

textA recurring feature of American elections is previous military service, for both candidates and the electorate. Despite a strict tradition of civilian supremacy over the military, the US exhibits a recurring magnetism toward leaders with martial pedigree. In the electorate, civilian veterans are an oft-cited voting bloc in primary and general elections with uncertain impact, often garnering direct appeals from candidates and media attention. This dissertation consists of chapters dealing with the intersection of military service and politics in its manifestations across different arenas of electoral competition: the use of previous military service by presidential and congressional campaigns, and in the electorate by measuring, analyzing, and explaining veterans’ electorate turnout, political attitudes, vote choices, and partisan preferences. Keywords: military veterans, political participation, voting, cohort analysis, turnout, public opinion, presidential campaigns, congressional campaigns, interest groups.Governmen

Replication Data for: Density, Race, and Vote Choice in the 2008 and 2012 Presidential Elections

2008 and 2012 CCES data along with population density and demographics at the zipcode level from the 2010 ACS (5-year

Targeted enrichment outperforms other enrichment techniques and enables more multi-species RNA-Seq analyses.

Enrichment methodologies enable the analysis of minor members in multi-species transcriptomic data. We compared the standard enrichment of bacterial and eukaryotic mRNA to a targeted enrichment using an Agilent SureSelect (AgSS) capture for Brugia malayi, Aspergillus fumigatus, and the Wolbachia endosymbiont of B. malayi (wBm). Without introducing significant systematic bias, the AgSS quantitatively enriched samples, resulting in more reads mapping to the target organism. The AgSS-enriched libraries consistently had a positive linear correlation with their unenriched counterparts (r2 = 0.559-0.867). Up to a 2,242-fold enrichment of RNA from the target organism was obtained following a power law (r2 = 0.90), with the greatest fold enrichment achieved in samples with the largest ratio difference between the major and minor members. While using a single total library for prokaryote and eukaryote enrichment from a single RNA sample could be beneficial for samples where RNA is limiting, we observed a decrease in reads mapping to protein coding genes and an increase in multi-mapping reads to rRNAs in AgSS enrichments from eukaryotic total RNA libraries compared to eukaryotic poly(A)-enriched libraries. Our results support a recommendation of using AgSS targeted enrichment on poly(A)-enriched libraries for eukaryotic captures, and total RNA libraries for prokaryotic captures, to increase the robustness of multi-species transcriptomic studies

Targeted enrichment outperforms other enrichment techniques and enables more multi-species RNA-Seq analyses.

Enrichment methodologies enable the analysis of minor members in multi-species transcriptomic data. We compared the standard enrichment of bacterial and eukaryotic mRNA to a targeted enrichment using an Agilent SureSelect (AgSS) capture for Brugia malayi, Aspergillus fumigatus, and the Wolbachia endosymbiont of B. malayi (wBm). Without introducing significant systematic bias, the AgSS quantitatively enriched samples, resulting in more reads mapping to the target organism. The AgSS-enriched libraries consistently had a positive linear correlation with their unenriched counterparts (r2 = 0.559-0.867). Up to a 2,242-fold enrichment of RNA from the target organism was obtained following a power law (r2 = 0.90), with the greatest fold enrichment achieved in samples with the largest ratio difference between the major and minor members. While using a single total library for prokaryote and eukaryote enrichment from a single RNA sample could be beneficial for samples where RNA is limiting, we observed a decrease in reads mapping to protein coding genes and an increase in multi-mapping reads to rRNAs in AgSS enrichments from eukaryotic total RNA libraries compared to eukaryotic poly(A)-enriched libraries. Our results support a recommendation of using AgSS targeted enrichment on poly(A)-enriched libraries for eukaryotic captures, and total RNA libraries for prokaryotic captures, to increase the robustness of multi-species transcriptomic studies