Education Commons^™

The Relationship Between Financial Literacy, Financial Status, And Academic Success In College Students, Brian Douglas Brausch

Dissertations

As the cost of college continues to rise, an increasing number of students are relying on loans and credit cards to fund their postsecondary education. In an effort to curb student debt and increase retention and graduation rates, many universities have begun to offer financial literacy initiatives to stimulate financial knowledge and promote positive money management behaviors.

This study examines the relationship between a for-credit personal financial literacy course and student academic success and economic status. Students who took a personal finance course during their first or second year of college are compared to a random sampling of students who …

Worker Signals Among New College Graduates: The Role Of Selectivity And Gpa, Brad J. Hershbein

Brad J. Hershbein

Recent studies have found a large earnings premium to attending a more selective college, but the mechanisms underlying this premium have received little attention and remain unclear. In order to shed light on this question, I develop a multidimensional signaling model relying on college grades and selectivity that rationalizes students’ choices of effort and firms’ wage-setting behavior. The model is then used to produce predictions of how the interaction of the signals should be related to wages, namely that the return on college GPA should fall the more selective the institution attended. Using five data sets that span the early …

The Impact Of Honor Codes And Perceptions Of Cheating On Academic Cheating Behaviors, Especially For Mba Bound Undergraduates, Heather M. O'Neill, Christian A. Pfeiffer

Business and Economics Faculty Publications

Researchers studying academic dishonesty in college often focus on demographic characteristics of cheaters and discuss changes in cheating trends over time. To predict cheating behavior, some researchers examine the costs and benefits of academic cheating, while others view campus culture and the role which honor codes play in affecting behavior. This paper develops a model of academic cheating based on three sets of incentives - moral, social and economic—and how they affect cheating behaviors. An on-line survey comprising 61 questions was administered to students from three liberal arts colleges in the USA in spring 2008, yielding 700 responses, with half …

Strivers And Underachievers: Effects On First Year College Grades And Retention, Heather M. O'Neill

Business and Economics Faculty Publications

In 1999, the Educational Testing Service created a Strivers Index where students who scored 200 points higher than expected on the SAT exam, based on their socioeconomic background, were called Strivers. Similarly, an Underachiever is a student who scores 200 below expected on the SAT. The presumption is that tagging a student as Striver or Underachiever will assist admissions offices in selecting the students. How Strivers and Underachievers perform in their first year academically and their college persistence patterns are examined in this paper.

First Year Versus Second Year Retention Of College Students: A Case Study, Heather M. O'Neill

Business and Economics Faculty Publications

Students and their families expend much time, effort and money researching which colleges or universities will best suit the students' needs. Simultaneously, institutions desire to find the cohort of students who will succeed at their schools. Recently, faced with more stringent economic constraints, schools are not only seeking students likely to succeed, but are more aware of the financial burden placed on schools if attrition is high. Since the cost of recruiting a class has risen over the years, the cost of losing students has increased. As a result, institutions are more interested in engaging in student retention studies to …