Monnica Chan

Assistant Professor, University of Massachusetts-Boston

Chapter Member: Boston SSN

Areas of Expertise:

Connect with Monnica

About Monnica

Chan's research seeks to understand how social and economic inequalities manifest in students' postsecondary educational experiences. She explores this by using descriptive statistics to document trends over time and quasi-experimental methods to evaluate policy and programmatic impacts on student trajectories in and through college. Her current research projects investigate how students pay for college and the impact of financial aid on student outcomes during and after college.

Contributions | No Jargon Podcast | Member Spotlight | In the News | Publications

Contributions

Dr. Monnica Chan’s Public Comment on the U.S. Department of Education's Proposed Title IV Regulations

Public Comment, June 2025

No Jargon Podcast

Episode 284:
The New Reality of College Debt

September 2025

In the News

Guest on The MEFA Podcast, September 3, 2024.

Opinion: "5 Things to Consider Before Taking out a Student Loan," Monnica Chan (with David J. Nguyen and Katie N. Smith), The Conversation, August 28, 2019.

Publications

"Indebted Over Time: Racial Differences in Student Borrowing" (with Jihye Kwon, David J. Nguyen, Katherine M. Saunders, Nilkamal Shah, and Katie N. Smith). Educational Researcher 48, no. 8 (2019): 558-563.

Analyzes changes in federal student loan borrowing from 2000 to 2016, focusing on differences across racial and ethnic groups. Findings show that borrowing patterns have increasingly diverged by race/ethnicity, even after accounting for institutional and financial factors.