Current Work

What’s keeping me busy lately

Higher Education Research - UT Austin

This summer, along with Professor Jon Rork and my classmate Sam Kuo, I have been looking at IPEDS data. After working to wrangle all of into a manageable database, I created a few tools to help visualize and explore the data. As of right now they are still a little bit too rough around the edges for me to publish them, but once I do a little bit of polishing they will be publicly hosted here.

Out of that exploration, we decided to look at UT Austin around the 2011 legislative change which limited what percentage of the student body could come from the guaranteed acceptance program. In particular, initial plots showed UT Austin as having a changing graduation rate and Pell Grant percentage right around 2015 which is when we would expect to see effects from that shock to really start materializing.

We are currently in the process of writing a paper testing the effects of this shock–which our theoretical model hypothesizes would create a more competitive, selective college. Testing this empirically required me to learn about Synthetic Control Models and their cousin Synthetic Differences in Differences Models. This page will be updated as we formalize more of our results and get a better draft of a working paper going throughout this semester.