Past Faculty Achievement Pages:
December 2007 Faculty Profile: Jessica Howell Professor Howell joined the department in 2003 after completing her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on the Economics of Education. Specifically, she examines the racial/ethnic and socioeconomic differences in the determinants of individuals’ choices and academic outcomes at various stages of the education pipeline, including academic preparation for college, college application, matriculation, degree completion, and career choice. Because education research is conducted by economists, sociologists, psychometricians, and even researchers in medical fields, Professor Howell's research often provides her with opportunities to work with other quantitative researchers on important public policy issues.
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Currently, Professor Howell is working on research funded by the CSUS Research and Creative Activities Program; the Association for Institutional Research; and the Institute of Education Sciences (U.S. Department of Education). In the first project, “An Evaluation of the Early Assessment Program and its Effect on Students’ Postsecondary Application, Enrollment, and Academic Preparation at California State University,” she investigates an early intervention program that targets all California high school juniors and provides participants with explicit information about their college readiness and guidelines for achieving readiness. In a second project, “College Readiness to Degree Completion: Remedial Placement and Patterns of College Persistence,” Dr. Howell examines whether college students who are required to take remedial coursework have the same patterns of college persistence and time-to-degree completion as observationally equivalent college students who are not required to take such courses. A third project, “The Effects of Institutional Practices on Postsecondary Trajectories—Matriculation, Persistence and Time to Degree,” examines how course availability, scheduling constraints, and university overcrowding impact students’ progress toward four-year college degree completion.
Taken together, these projects seek to identify a variety of university practices and public policy interventions that demonstrate the potential to increase stagnant baccalaureate degree completion rates at U.S. colleges and universities.