There is a well established socioeconomic gradient in educational attainment, despite much effort in recent decades to address this inequality. This study evaluates a university access program that provides financial, academic and social support to low socioeconomic status (SES) students using a natural experiment which exploits the time variation in the expansion of the program across schools. The program has parallels with US affirmative actions programs, although preferential treatment is based on SES rather than ethnicity. Evaluating the effectiveness of programs targeting disadvantaged students in Ireland is particularly salient given the high rate of return to education and the lack of intergenerational mobility in educational attainment. Overall, we identify positive treatment effects on first year exam performance, progression to second year and final year graduation rates, with the impact often stronger for higher ability students. We find similar patterns of results for students that entered through the regular system and the 'affirmative action' group i.e. the students that entered with lower high school grades. The program affects the performance of both male and female students, albeit in different ways. This study suggests that access programs can be an effective means of improving academic outcomes for socio-economically disadvantaged students.
JEL Classifications: I21Keywords: Education inequality, Access programs, Natural experiment, Economics of education We are grateful to the administrators at the Irish university for assisting us in collating the admissions and exams data used in the analysis. We would also like to thank the access program staff for their help and advice. This research was funded by the Irish Higher Education Authority through the Strategic Innovation Fund. Thanks also to Colm Harmon (UCD), Ian Walker (Lancaster University), Robin Naylor Recent work has suggested the relative unimportance of credit constraints for university education in the US and the UK (Carneiro and Heckman, 2003; Dearden, McGranahan, and Sianesi, 2004) and emphasized the higher returns to early intervention in improving educational outcomes (Cunha and Heckman, 2007;Heckman, Moon, Pinto, Savelyev, and Yavitz, 2009b).Nonetheless, the most prevalent educational policy in most countries is targeted intervention programs by universities and colleges to boost enrolment and retention by disadvantaged social groups.While access programs are becoming increasingly diverse in their approach to tackling the barriers to progression and promoting success at university, the majority of programs focus exclusively on providing financial supports to students. Thus much of the literature, as randomly assigned to three groups which received academic support, financial incentives or a combination of the two. The program was found to reduce the probability of first year withdrawal by 10% and had positive effects on GPA. These effects were greater for students who received the combined financial and academic suppo...