How Does Undergraduate Debt Affect Graduate School Application and Enrollment?
- PDF / 679,335 Bytes
- 28 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 6 Downloads / 204 Views
How Does Undergraduate Debt Affect Graduate School Application and Enrollment? Rong Chen1 · Peter Riley Bahr2 Received: 12 November 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This study estimates the short- and long-term effects of undergraduate educational debt on students’ decisions to apply and to enroll in graduate school after completing requirements for a baccalaureate degree, using marginal mean weighting through stratification method (MMW-S) to analyze data from the National Center for Education Statistics Baccalaureate and Beyond 2008–2012 (B&B 08-12) survey. Although we find that historically and socioeconomically disadvantaged groups tend to accumulate higher levels of educational debt, our results indicate minimal effects of undergraduate debt on graduation school application and enrollment. We find no differences by race/ethnicity, family income, or status as a first-generation baccalaureate recipient in the effects of educational debt on graduate school application or enrollment. Keywords Loan · Debt · Financial aid · Policy · Graduate education · Graduate school
Introduction Since the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act in 1992, federal financial aid has shifted significantly toward loans and away from grants. Partly as a result of this change in policy, there has been a substantial increase in the debt accrued by college students (Baum and Schwartz 2006; Scherschel 1998), nearly doubling between 1993 and 2007 (Heller 2001; Reed 2008) and tripling between 2004 and 2012 (Lee et al. 2014). More recent statistics indicate that, in 2017–2018, 65% of college seniors who graduated with baccalaureate degrees owed on student loans, with an average educational debt of $29,200 (Gonzalez et al. 2019). Indeed, some have described today’s college graduates as “Generation Debt” (Kamenetz 2006; Pinto and Mansfield 2006). Much of the prior research on educational indebtedness has focused on the effects of student loans and other forms of financial aid on student persistence at the * Rong Chen [email protected] 1
Department of Education Leadership, Management and Policy, Seton Hall University, Jubilee Hall, Room 421, South Orange, NJ 07079, USA
2
Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Research in Higher Education
undergraduate level (Dowd 2008). However, this is just one facet of the larger picture of how undergraduate borrowing influences students’ decision-making, including decisions about enrollment and persistence in graduate school (Dowd 2008; Heller 2001; Millett 2003). Although approximately one-third of students in higher education are graduate students (Mullen et al. 2003), our understanding of how educational debt shapes the face of the most highly educated segment of the nation’s population remains limited. This gap in the literature is all the more glaring in light of two important facts. First, the burden of educational debt is distributed unevenly across undergraduates: students of historically disad
Data Loading...
