Navigating Success in Higher Education: Generative AI, Financial Well-being, and Parental Support

Postsecondary education is viewed as a sure path to economic mobility. This dissertation contains three essays which examine correlates of postsecondary value. Postsecondary students face a variety of stressors throughout their college career which may impact their ability to be successful. They must complete their coursework and pass their classes while balancing work, social, and familial obligations. Tools such as generative AI may help students achieve their goals even in the face of personal challenges such as low financial stability or the inability to afford the high costs of college. Together these essays add to the body of literature which informs postsecondary policy in the United States.The first essay focuses on the impact of generative AI Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT on undergraduate student grades. The widespread availability of generative AI has changed the landscape of teaching and learning in postsecondary education. Undergraduate students gained access to the technology when ChatGPT was publicly released in late 2022. Typical of new technologies, most early adopters were younger and more willing to explore new technologies that might ease the burdens of schoolwork they may perceive as tedious. As public curiosity around artificial intelligence soared, mainstream media outlets investigated the much-echoed worries of parents and educators that AI-assistance to schoolwork might be too powerful, robbing students of the learning value of trial-and-error. Discussion circulated on the potential impact to student output and the potential for professors to be unable to discern the difference between student-generated work and work that was generated, pre-trained, or transformed by the large language models behind ChatGPT. While the conversation around generative AI has shifted in the past 18 months, little is known about how generative AI directly effects student grades. This paper uses a difference-in-differences approach to find the causal impact of generative AI on undergraduate student semester GPA. I find that access to generative AI raises student grades by about 3% of a standard deviation.Second, I examine the relationship between student financial well-being and postsecondary value as defined by the Postsecondary Value Commission. Postsecondary education is often heralded as a pathway to economic mobility, yet the financial pressures students face can hinder their ability to fully benefit from this opportunity. Using factor analysis, I identify three components of financial well-being—stability, confidence, and behaviors—and investigate their distribution across diverse student populations. I find that financial well-being is heterogeneously distributed. Female students, non-White students and independent students are more likely to suffer from low financial well-being. I then conduct an analysis of the correlation between the factors of financial well-being and postsecondary value. I find that postsecondary institutions with higher proportions of financially vulnerable students are also likely to have lower postsecondary value.In the third essay, I investigate the financial well-being of parents who have taken out loans to pay for their child’s postsecondary education. Postsecondary education is often seen as a pathway to economic mobility, but the high costs of college may make it an unattainable goal for undergraduate students on their own. Federal Parent PLUS loans are a policy option which provide parents access to federal student loans which can be used to fund their undergraduate dependent student’s education provided they do not have an adverse credit history. While the PLUS loans program may increase access to postsecondary institutions for some students who might otherwise be unable to enroll, the impact of the loans on the parent borrower is understudied. This paper investigates how financial well-being is affected by borrowing for a dependent undergraduate student. I combine 11 years of survey responses from the Survey of Household Economic Decisionmaking (SHED) and find that, on average, intergenerational borrowing for a dependent undergraduate student’s education is associated with lower financial well-being for the borrower.