Volume 38, Number 3 (Summer) 2003
Stinebricker, Ralph, and Todd Stinebricker. 2003. "Understanding Educational Outcomes of Students from Low-Income Families: Evidence from a Liberal Arts College with a Full Tuition Subsidy Program." Journal of Human Resources 38(3):591-617.
Issues related to the schooling attainment of children from
low-income families arise frequently in current education policy debates. There
has been a specific interest in understanding why a very high percentage of
children from low-income families do not graduate from college and why the
college graduation rates of children from low-income families are substantially
lower than those of children from other families. Using unique new data obtained
directly from a high-quality liberal arts college that maintains a full tuition
subsidy program (and large room and board subsidies) for all students, this
paper provides direct evidence that reasons unrelated to the direct costs of
college are very important in explaining these realities.
Ralph Stinebrickner is a professor of mathematics at Berea College. Todd
R. Stinebrickner is a professor of economics at the University of Western
Ontario. The authors would like to thank Pam Thomas for her invaluable
assistance with this project, particularly the data extraction phase. They are
also grateful for helpful comments which were provided by John Bound, Caroline
M. Hoxby, Jeff Smith, Dan Black, Chris Swann, Ben Scafidi, Sarah Turner, Susan
Dynarski and seminar participants at a meeting of the NBER higher education
group, the University of Michigan, Duke University, the University of Virginia,
the University of Western Ontario, Queens University, York University, UC
Irvine, McMaster, Georgia State, and the Upjohn Institute. The authors are
grateful for generous funding from the Mellon Foundation and SSHRC. Ralph was
supported in part by Berea College through funding for a sabbatical leave. Todd
received generous support from the CIBC and the Agnes Cole Dark fund. Many
useful discussions took place at the Osceola Research Institute. The data used
in this article can be obtained from the author beginning February 2004 through
January 2007.
© 2003 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X