Economics

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Investigating the Effect of No-Loan Policies on Higher-Education Enrollment Decisions for Low-Income Students
(2016) Adams, Gaines; Preston, Anne Elizabeth
This thesis expands upon the work of Waddell and Singell by investigating the effects of no-loan policies on the enrollment of low-income students at elite, private institutions. We utilize a hand-constructed timeline of no-loan policy implementation at 33 elite institutions from 2000 to 2012 in order to run multiple institution and year level fixed effects regressions. Our findings indicate that no-loan policies increase the enrollment of low-income students by 14.4% at liberal arts schools within our elite sample but that there is no significant impact of their implementation at elite, private universities. With respect to our entire 70-institution sample, we find a significant, positive influx of low-income students in response to an increase in the percentage of those schools offering a no-loan policy. We believe these findings suggest that a considerable number of low-income students forego an elite education due to a reluctance to take on the loans necessary to do so.