Justin Ortagus

📢 #EdWorkingPapers: A new study by @eburland.bsky.social and colleagues shows how administrative burdens and fractured responsibilities limit take-up of Michigan’s Tuition Incentive Program.

📄 Full paper here: edworkingpapers.com/ai25-1283

You're unstoppable today!

My department is searching for two tenure-line positions to start in August 2026. Come join our growing team and make a difference in building the future!

Assistant professor of higher education: apply.interfolio.com/172680

Associate/full professor of education policy: apply.interfolio.com/172632

An Introduction to REACT | MDRC Over 40 million Americans are college “stop-outs,” meaning they have some college credit but left college before earning a degree. This issue focus describes a study of REACT, which offers such studen...

NEW!

Improving College Reenrollment and Completion for “Stopped-Out” Students

A random assignment evaluation with @justinortagus.bsky.social examining the effectiveness of the REACT intervention at four colleges in Florida. www.mdrc.org/work/publica...

Thanks, Josh!

I have some news: After 10 years at the University of Florida (UF), I've joined the University of Texas at Austin as a Professor in the College of Education and LBJ School of Public Affairs. I'll miss my friends and colleagues at UF, but I'm looking forward to this next phase of my career.

A new practitioner's guide to staggered difference-in-difference designs

arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13323

As enrollment in online college grows, students wonder: Why does it cost more? Rather than lowering the price, some universities use online courses to subsidize everything else.

I'm quoted in this interesting write-up featured in @npr.org, which focuses on why online courses don't necessarily cost less than face-to-face courses in higher education.

www.npr.org/2025/03/15/n...

Digital Hub or Hindrance? The Effects of Online Enrollment in Introductory STEM Coursework on STEM Outcomes - Research in Higher Education Online education has the potential to remove barriers and increase access to higher education, but previous studies have revealed mixed results regarding the effect of online enrollment on college stu...

New @ #RIHE: @justinortagus.bsky.social et al. use fuzzy RDD to examine impact of online enrollment in intro STEM coursework on students’ probability of STEM success. They find that taking the online version of a required intro STEM course increases students’ time-to-degree. doi.org/10.1007/s111...

How are parents affected by their kid going to college? How are they affected when their kid gets a scholarship or grant?

New working paper with @palaashbhargava.bsky.social @econsandy.bsky.social @odedgurantz.bsky.social and Rob Fairlie

www.nber.org/papers/w33497

Taken together, we learned quite a bit about the design and implementation of re-enrollment interventions and used those data-driven takeaways to inform the next phase of our re-enrollment work, with an emphasis on multimodal messaging, more generous waivers, and personalized advising.

Although we showed in earlier work that the “information and one-course waiver” treatment had a positive impact on former students’ likelihood of re-enrollment, our new findings show that the intervention had no effect on students’ likelihood of long-term persistence or credential completion.

The general logic of this re-enrollment intervention was to examine whether combining streamlined information and a one-course tuition waiver would lead to increases in former students' likelihood of re-enrolling and ultimately completing their degree.

Experimental Evidence of the Impact of Re-Enrollment Campaigns on Long-Term Academic Outcomes Abstract. Most students who begin at a community college do not complete their desired credential. Many students fail to graduate due to various barriers other than their academic performance. To enco...

🚨 Updated findings of a re-enrollment intervention 🚨

In our new paper, we find that our re-enrollment intervention had no effect on students’ likelihood of long-term persistence or credential completion for the pooled sample and every subgroup of interest.

direct.mit.edu/edfp/article...

We just received a "stop work notice" for an IES review panel scheduled to happen next week.

Pa. panel launches attempt to tie some funding for Pitt, 2 other universities to performance HARRISBURG – A new council on Tuesday met in the Capitol to start figuring out how to make at least some of the half-billion dollars-plus that the...

I testified yesterday about the intended and unintended consequences of performance-based funding for Pennsylvania to consider when implementing the policy. Here's some coverage of the hearing by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: www.post-gazette.com/news/politic...

Online programs, unlike brick-and-mortar ones, also have few limits to their growth potential. But the more students they enroll, the harder it is to support them, Ortagus said, leading many students to rely on “self-directed learning practices” that can be even more difficult for the busy, often underprepared populations part-time distance programs serve. “I don’t think there’s this conference of people twisting their mustaches and trying to keep students from completing their degrees. But I genuinely think whenever you are trying to enroll as many students as possible, you risk dipping into suboptimal teaching and learning practices,” he said. “Online students can feel like they’re on an island, teaching themselves confusing concepts, and that’s not an optimal pathway to completion.”

This is a thoughtful piece on the issue of lower completion rates for fully online colleges. And I expect to see @justinortagus.bsky.social twirling a mustache the next time I see him on Zoom. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

Distance to Degrees: How College Proximity Shapes Students’ Enrollment Choices and Attainment Across Race-Ethnicity and Socioeconomic Status Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

Important new research by @riacton.bsky.social and colleagues uses Texas data to look at how sensitive students are to distance to the nearest colleges, with important differences by race/ethnicity.

www.nber.org/papers/w33337

I'm making my glorious return to Bluesky to promote our forthcoming paper on the (generally positive) influence of HBCU enrollment on a host of longer-term outcomes. Really enjoyed working with Ashley Edwards, @jonisaacsmith.bsky.social, and Andria Smythe.

Congrats, Walt!

My latest paper focuses on exclusively online degree programs and is now available online. We find a negative relationship between enrolling in an exclusively online degree program and degree completion, particularly at for-profit four-year institutions.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/...

Looking forward to digging into this new working paper! @justinortagus.bsky.social
"HBCU Enrollment and Longer-Term Outcomes"
Link: edworkingpapers.com/ai23-883

My research team's newest article is out in Educational Researcher. We examined the extent to which different state funding models are associated with college access and success. Short answer: not much, which aligns with research on performance funding.