Evaluating Post-Secondary Aid: Enrollment, Persistence, and Projected Completion Effects

Abstract

This paper reports updated findings from a randomized evaluation of a generous, privatelyfunded scholarship program for Nebraska public college students. Scholarship offers boosted college enrollment and persistence. Four years after award receipt, randomly-selected scholarship winners were 13 percentage points more likely to be enrolled in college. Enrollment effects were larger for groups with historically low college attendance, including nonwhite students, firstgeneration college-goers, and students with low high school GPAs. Scholarships shifted many students from two-to four-year colleges, reducing associate's degree completion in the process. Despite their substantial gains in four-year college enrollment, award winners from the first study cohort were slightly less likely to graduate on time than control applicants, suggesting that scholarships delay degree completion for some students. Projected graduation rates using the last cohort of pre-experimental scholarship applicants indicate that scholarships are likely to increase bachelor's degree completion within five years.

Supporting Community College Students from Start to Degree Completion: Long-Term Evidence from a Randomized Trial of CUNY’s ASAP

“…This issue is compounded by community colleges' shortage of on-campus student support services, as noted above. Not only is there a correlation between student success and financial concerns, but multiple studies have produced experimental evidence that finance-related reforms can positively, although often modestly, influence students' academic progress (Angrist et al 2014(Angrist et al , 2016Angrist, Lang, and Oreopoulos 2009;Angrist, Oreopoulos, and Williams 2010;Bettinger et al 2012;Cohodes and Goodman 2014;Deming and Dynarski 2009;Goldrick-Rab et al 2016;.…”

Educational inequality and public policy preferences: Evidence from representative survey experiments

“…An argument for expanding whole-day schools is that they improve the quality of afternoon activities for children from disadvantaged backgrounds and therefore equalize opportunity (e.g.,Blau and Currie, 2006).14 See, e.g.,Dynarski (2003),Fack and Grenet (2015), andAngrist et al (2016) for evidence that student aid affects college attendance and completion.15 While the list of equity-oriented policies investigated in this paper is by no means exhaustive, they include some of the most common proposals to increase equality of opportunities in Germany.16 Note that the two treatments are identical in all preceding stages of the experiment, i.e., belief elicitation, information provision, and elicitation of concerns.…”

Crime and Education in a Model of Information Transmission

“…This implies that meritocratic policies may hurt less talented students and should be accompanied by policies that neutralize this effect. We also show that when students do not fully understand the learning dynamics, the effect on the less talented students become exacerbated, and we hence conclude that meritocratic policies, such as those studied by Angrist et al (2016), Bettinger et al (2016 and Marx and Turner (2015) should be accompanied by information campaigns.…”