| This thesis studies the relationship between college enrollment and willingness to borrow for women and men of different races and different SES levels.;The impetus for this study comes from concern about declining college enrollments of lower-SES and minority students and speculation that this decline is partly attributable to changes in the loan/grant mix of student aid. Despite the prevalence of this speculation in the literature, little work has been done in this area.;In this study, an innovative methodology, discrete-time survival analysis, was used to estimate the probabilities of college enrollment over three years (twelve quarters) of 10,700 White, Black and Hispanic high-school graduates from the High School and Beyond Senior cohort.;The results of the study suggest that: (1) The probability of enrolling is highest (about.50) during the first quarter after high school graduation and falls sharply for all remaining quarters. (2) The probabilities follow a "seasonal" pattern: highest in fall and spring, lower in winter and summer. (3) Controlling for background characteristics (high school program, ability and SES), White students are more likely to enroll than minority students. Higher-SES students are also more likely to enroll, but the SES effect is less pronounced for minority students. (4) Controlling for background characteristics, women are more likely to enroll than men. As SES rises, this "gender gap" narrows for White students and widens for minority students. (5) Controlling for background characteristics, the probabilities of enrolling for students who are willing to borrow are similar to those of students who would overcome a tuition shortfall by attending a lower-cost school or by getting a part-time job, and differ only from the probabilities of those who would go to college later.;These results suggest that students' concern about the "affordability gap" between their personal resources and college costs--and not unwillingness-to-borrow per se--discourages enrollment. That is, students who believe they can bridge the gap, either by borrowing, working part-time or going to a lower-cost school, are more likely to enroll than those who think the affordability gap cannot be closed. |
