THREE PAPERS ON POSTSECONDARY ACCESS AND SUCCESS IN TENNESSEE

The purpose of this dissertation is to better understand postsecondary access and success in the context of Tennessee. Postsecondary access and success are important policy issues to explore as participation in the U.S. labor market increasingly requires a postsecondary credential. This three-paper dissertation examines these issues by focusing on two aspects of postsecondary access and success: rural residents, who may face unique, structural barriers to postsecondary access, and the role of public assistance programs in providing essential basic needs assistance to students pursuing college degrees. In the first, co-authored paper, Dr. Adela Soliz and I describe the landscape of rural postsecondary access in Tennessee by exploring regional variation in rural college-going using state administrative data. In the second paper, I build on this work by estimating the effect of a supplemental college counseling program in rural high schools in Tennessee. In the last paper, I move beyond college access to focus on a particular college persistence issue: basic needs insecurity. I use interview and focus group data from students and administrators from three community colleges in Tennessee to describe students’ participation in three public assistance programs: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). Together, these papers contribute to existing literature on postsecondary access and success by highlighting the unique contexts that frame rural residents’ college-going, evaluating the impact of an intervention for increasing rural residents’ postsecondary access, and describing how students’ engagement with public assistance programs is important for facilitating their college persistence.