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Aspiring college students and their families have many options. A student can attend an in-state or an out-of-state school, a public or private college, a two-year community college program or a four-year university program. Students can attend full-time and have a bachelor of arts degree by the age of twenty-three or mix college and work, progressing toward a degree more slowly. To make matters more complicated, the array of financial aid available is more complex than ever. Students and their families must weigh federal grants, state merit scholarships, college tax credits, and college savings accounts, just to name a few.

In College Choices, Caroline Hoxby and a distinguished group of economists show how students and their families really make college decisions—how they respond to financial aid options, how peer relationships figure in the decision-making process, and even whether they need mentoring to get through the admissions process. Students of all sorts are considered—from poor students, who may struggle with applications and whether to continue on to college, to high aptitude students who are offered "free rides" at elite schools. College Choices utilizes the best methods and latest data to analyze the college decision-making process, while explaining how changes in aid and admissions practices inform those decisions as well.

Even as the number of students attending college has more than doubled in the past forty years, it is still the case that nearly half of all college students in the United States will not complete their degree within six years. It is clear that much remains to be done toward improving student success. For more than twenty years, Vincent Tinto’s pathbreaking book Leaving College has been recognized as the definitive resource on student retention in higher education. Now, with Completing College, Tinto offers administrators a coherent framework with which to develop and implement programs to promote completion.

Deftly distilling an enormous amount of research, Tinto identifies the essential conditions enabling students to succeed and continue on within institutions. Especially during the early years, he shows that students thrive in settings that pair high expectations for success with structured academic, social, and financial support, provide frequent feedback and assessments of their performance, and promote their active involvement with other students and faculty. And while these conditions may be worked on and met at different institutional levels, Tinto points to the classroom as the center of student education and life, and therefore the primary target for institutional action.

Improving retention rates continues to be among the most widely studied fields in higher education, and Completing College carefully synthesizes the latest research and, most importantly, translates it into practical steps that administrators can take to enhance student success.

The last two decades have been a turbulent period for American higher education, with profound demographic shifts, gyrating salaries, and marked changes in the economy. While enrollments rose about 50% in that period, sharp increases in tuition and fees at colleges and universities provoke accusations of inefficiency, even outright institutional greed and irresponsibility. As the 1990s progress, surpluses in the academic labor supply may give way to shortages in many fields, but will there be enough new Ph.D.'s to go around?

Drawing on the authors' experience as economists and educators, this book offers an accessible analysis of three crucial economic issues: the growth and composition of undergraduate enrollments, the supply of faculty in the academic labor market, and the cost of operating colleges and universities. The study provides valuable insights for administrators and scholars of education.

In this 1994 classic work on student retention, Vincent Tinto synthesizes far-ranging research on student attrition and on actions institutions can and should take to reduce it. The key to effective retention, Tinto demonstrates, is in a strong commitment to quality education and the building of a strong sense of inclusive educational and social community on campus.  He applies his theory of student departure to the experiences of minority, adult, and graduate students, and to the situation facing commuting institutions and two-year colleges. Especially critical to Tinto’s model is the central importance of the classroom experience and the role of multiple college communities. 

Even high-performing students sometimes need assistance to transform their high school achievement into a higher education outcome that matches their potential, especially when those students come from vulnerable backgrounds. Without intervention, many of these students, lost in the transition between secondary school and higher education, would not attend selective colleges that provide greater opportunities. Potential on the Periphery profiles the Simmons Memorial Foundation (SMF), a grassroots non-profit organization co-founded by author Omari Scott Simmons, that promotes college access for students in North Carolina and Delaware. Simmons discusses how the organization has helped students secure admission and succeed in college, using this example to contextualize the broader realm of existing education practice, academic theory, and public policy. Using data gleaned from interviews with past student participants in the programs run by the SMF, Simmons illuminates the underlying factors thwarting student achievement, such as inadequate information about college options, limited opportunities for social capital acquisition, financial pressures, self-doubt, and political weakness. Simmons then identifies policy solutions and pragmatic strategies that college access organizations can adopt to address these factors. 

Retention and Resistance combines personal student narratives with a critical analysis of the current approach to retention in colleges and universities, and explores how retention can inform a revision of goals for first-year writing teachers.

Retention is a vital issue for institutions, but as these students’ stories show, leaving college is often the result of complex and idiosyncratic individual situations that make institutional efforts difficult and ultimately ineffective. An adjustment of institutional and pedagogical objectives is needed to refocus on educating as many students as possible, including those who might leave before graduation.

Much of the pedagogy, curricula, and methodologies of composition studies assume students are preparing for further academic study. Retention and Resistance argues for a new kairotic pedagogy that moves toward an emphasis on the present classroom experience and takes students’ varied experiences into account. Infusing the discourse of retention with three individual student voices, Powell explores the obligation of faculty to participate in designing an institution that educates all students, no matter where they are in their educational journey or how far that journey will go.

In the United States today, there are some 3,400 separately governed colleges and universities, amounting to a higher education industry with expenditures that constitute 2.8% of the gross national product. Yet, the economic issues affecting this industry have been paid relatively little attention. In this collection of eight essays, experts in economics and education bring economic analysis to bear on such underexamined topics as the nature of competition in higher education, higher education's use of resources, and who chooses to purchase what kind of education and why.

In higher education, supply refers to such issues as government support for public colleges and universities, the means by which graduate programs allocate financial support to students, and the criteria that universities use for investing endowments. Demand pertains to patterns of student enrollment and to the government, business, and individual market for the service and research activities of higher education.

Why are tuitions nearly the same among schools despite differences in prestige? How are institutions with small endowments able to compete successfully with institutions that have huge endowments? How are race and ethnicity reflected in enrollment trends? Where do the best students go? What choices among colleges do young people from low-income backgrounds face? This volume addresses these questions and suggests subjects for further study of the economics of higher education.