We have been looking at variations in the four year graduation rate of well over 500 schools, trying to explain variations between them. Why do some schools graduate 80 percent of their students or more in four years --while others graduate just 30 percent? As in many other things, conventional wisdom is often just plain wrong.

...Conventional wisdom is that economic worries are a big cause of college dropping out, and when schools up financial aid to students, it should improve the prospects of graduation. Our results show the opposite --increases in financial aid are negatively related to graduation rates --in a statistically significant way. More financial aid means lower costs to students, incentivizing them to stick around college longer. So much for conventional wisdom. To be sure, there are some measurement and other issues, so the findings are not absolutely iron-clad, but they are still revealing.  Full Piece