No abstract

While research has documented outcomes for students served by promise programs, few studies have considered the behavior of institutions themselves in the promise era. A new source of revenue combined with larger and more diverse cohorts is likely to motivate changes in spending and staffing—decisions instrumental to student access and success. We employ complementary difference-in-differences and synthetic control strategies to estimate impacts of the first statewide promise program on these two outcomes. Findings suggest institutions diverted expenditures away from instruction, academic support, and institutional support toward greater institutional grant awards. We find no meaningful impact on staffing levels. While some institutional actions may further support the access and success goals of promise programs, the diversity of programs across the nation suggests not all may follow suit. This study should inform policy makers considering the full extent of outcomes of free-college programs and invigorate further research on institutional responses.

In 2015, Idaho adopted the nation’s first direct admissions system and proactively admitted all high school graduates to a set of public institutions. This reimagination of the admissions process may reduce barriers to students’ enrollment and improve access across geographic and socioeconomic contexts by removing many human capital, informational, and financial barriers in the college search and application process. Despite a lack of evidence on the efficacy of direct admissions systems, the policy has already been proposed or implemented in four other states. Using synthetic control methods, we estimate the first causal impacts of direct admissions on institutional enrollment outcomes. We find early evidence that direct admissions increased first-time undergraduate enrollments by 4–8% (50–100 students per campus on average) and in-state levels by approximately 8–15% (80–140 students) but had minimal-to-no impacts on the enrollment of Pell-eligible students. These enrollment gains were concentrated among 2-year, open-access institutions. We discuss these findings in relation to state contexts and policy design given the emergence of literature highlighting the varied efficacy of similar college access policies.

We replicate and extend prior work on Florida’s Bright Futures merit aid scholarship to consider its effect on college enrollment and degree completion. We estimate causal impacts using a regression discontinuity design to exploit SAT thresholds that strongly determine eligibility. We find no positive impacts on attendance or attainment, and instrumental variable results generally reject estimates as small as 1 to 2 percentage points. Across subgroups, we find that eligibility slightly reduces 6-year associate degree attainment for lower socioeconomic status students and may induce small enrollment shifts among Hispanic and White students toward 4-year colleges. Our findings of these minimal-at-best impacts contrast those of prior works, attributable in part to methodological improvements and more robust data, and further underscore the importance of study replication.