The authors attended discussions and interviewed instructors in Stanford’s Computer Science Department to identify successful approaches and problem areas in the rapid transition to online learning.

The US federal government has serially called upon colleges and universities to assist the nation in moments of national crisis. This brief outlines an ambitious plan to enlist the postsecondary sector in helping millions of Americans get back to work in the wake of the pandemic and equip them for ongoing prosperity in a highly dynamic economy.

Is there a gender pay gap among graduates in some science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields? Women and men have near-identical human capital at college exit, but cultural beliefs about men as more fit for STEM professions than women may lead to self-beliefs that affect pay. We hypothesized that women and men would be paid differently upon college exit,…

Using digital trace data to observe this process at scale at a private research university, together with qualitative student interviews, we provide a novel empirical study of course consideration as part of the course selection process.

As low-status academic offerings purveyed by high-status institutions, massively open online courses (MOOCs) are ambiguous credentials. In interviews with 60 people who devoted substantial time to at least one MOOC between 2014-2017, we find that people use MOOCs to build skills for application at work and home, build relationships, navigate life transitions, and enhance formal presentations of self.

We utilize a corpus of 240,000 admissions essays submitted by 60,000 applicants to the University of California in November 2016 to measure the relationship between the content of application essays, reported household income, and standardized test scores (SAT) at scale. We find that essays have a stronger correlation to reported household income than SAT scores.