Date of Award

2017

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Economics

First Advisor

Qi Ge

Abstract

This paper uses high school longitudinal dataset to address a central question: What are the factors determining whether a student decides to enroll in post-secondary education, particularly 4-year Bachelor’s degree programs? Employing a Probit empirical design, this study measures the probability of a student attending both post-secondary education and specifically Bachelorette programs when considering an array of student- and parent-specific independent variables. The results highlight the importance of family influence on a student’s PSE outcome, most notably parental expectation. Further analysis also indicates that students with PSE inclinations experience larger effects across all variables. The findings of this paper suggest policy-makers to focus on fostering a pro-PSE culture for low socioeconomic families at minority communities.

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