Essays in Education Economics

education;STEM;persistence in STEM;higher education;Economics;Business and Economics;Economics

Morar, DanielaStange, Kevin Michael ;

University of Michigan

关键词: education;    STEM;    persistence in STEM;    higher education;    Economics;    Business and Economics;    Economics;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/147549/morard_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

The three essays in this dissertation are focused on the factors that impact persistence in STEM majors.The first chapter uses administrative data from a large public university to investigate whether having a foreign teaching assistant (TA) in a STEM class affects the outcomes of U.S. undergraduate students . This essay considers both subjective outcomes (the median evaluation scores) and objective ones (the students;; course outcomes) and concludes that TAs from non-English speaking countries receive between 0.2 and 0.5 points lower median evaluations scores (on a five-point Likert scale) compared to their native-born counterparts, conditional on the course. However, being taught by a foreign TA does not have a significant impact on the students;; objective course outcomes, such as grades, STEM major declaration, and STEM graduation. These findings suggest that evaluations of teaching for foreign TAs should be used with caution as they might not be a clear reflection of teaching quality. The second chapter, from a work with Margaret Levenstein and Jason Owen-Smith, studies the impact of research experience on STEM graduation rates, where research experience is defined as having been employed on a federally funded grant at a large public university.This essay uses a unique dataset where student academic records were matched with longitudinal administrative data on federal research funding at a large public institution.The results find a statistically significant impact of research experience on the probability of graduating in a STEM major and also on the probability of graduating with any major. In addition, this paper begins to disentangle the gender and race related heterogeneous effects of research experience.The results show that undergraduate research employment helps narrow gender and financial gaps in graduation rates (both general and STEM). The findings of this paper indicate potential benefits to students of matriculating in more research-intensive environments and the possibility of interventions to improve the representativeness of STEM population.The third chapter, from a work with Margaret Levenstein and Jason Owen-Smith, analyzes at the effects of students;; socio-demographic and academic characteristics on the necessary and weakly sequential stages to achieve a STEM degree: taking a STEM course in the first year, declaring a STEM major, and graduating with a STEM major. By using model similar to that of Heckman and Smith (2004), this essay compares the STEM trajectories of male and female students and discusses the effects of different student characteristics on each stage of persistence in STEM. The results show that being a female decreases the likelihood of taking a STEM class in the first year and declaring a STEM major. The largest difference between men and women was in the declaring a major stage, where women were about $9$ percentage points less likely to declare a STEM major. This essay also presents decompositions of the effects of gender, race, financial aid status, ACT scores and high school grade point average on each stage leading towards the completion of a STEM degree. These findings suggest that exploring the different mechanisms affecting the differential propensities of male and female students to major in STEM could help reduce the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields.