Jesse Rothstein

This project will examine the extent to which college students access existing basic needs safety net benefits they are eligible for, and how those benefits affect their educational outcomes. Across the country, many college students struggle to meet their basic needs while attending school. Public higher education institutions are well-situated to facilitate student access to safety net benefits, but data limitations have hampered previous efforts to assess eligibility and encourage take-up...

When a randomized control trial is infeasible in an education setting, researchers can use quasi-experimental research designs. A commonly used approach is to use repeated observations of aggregate data, known as group panel data, before and after a new policy or intervention is put in place. To estimate the effects, researchers typically rely on either a comparative interrupted time series (CITS) or, increasingly, the synthetic control method (SCM), but there is not a clear set of best prac...