Money, mentoring and making friends: the impact of a multidimensional access program on student performance

Abstract

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...

The Narrative Past Inflection in Sesotho Child and Child-Directed Speech

“…It has official status in South Africa and Lesotho and is used in education and media in both countries. Major reference works on Sesotho structure include Doke and Mofokeng (1957), Guma (1971), and Du Plessis and Visser (1995). Sesotho morphosyntactic acquisition has been documented in several studies (e.g., Demuth, 1987Demuth, , 1989Demuth, , 1992Demuth, , 1995Demuth et al, 2005Demuth et al, , 2009Demuth et al, , 2010.…”

“…Sesotho has a complex TAM and negation system, even when compared to other Bantu languages (Gowlett, 2003). There are several past and future tense forms, a number of aspectual markers which can be combined in numerous ways, and also auxiliaries or deficient verbs that can appear before a lexical main verb that add a number of additional temporal, aspectual or modality related distinctions (Doke and Mofokeng, 1957;Gowlett, 2003, p. 631-636). While Sesotho is fairly well-documented in general, its TAM system is underdescribed, especially in terms of: (i) a detailed description and analysis of the functions of, and morphosyntactic and semantic restrictions on, most of its TAM morphemes (but see Morolong, 1978), (ii) the tone patterns 2 associated with the various TAM categories (though see Khoali, 1991 for tonal patterns of various types of clauses), and (iii) discussion of the conjoint/disjoint system (though see Letšeng, 1995).…”

“…Posthumus analyses this form as describing sequential or consecutive events. For Sesotho, the narrative past tense is described only in passing in Jacottet (1912), Doke and Mofokeng (1957), and Ferreira (1964). Gowlett (2003) only notes that what he calls the past and future "consecutives" should not be confused with the narrative.…”

“…Khoali (1991, p. 262) refers to a different tense as the "participial narrative past." The Sesotho narrative past is referred to as "past subjunctive" in Doke and Mofokeng (1957). In their terminology, this relates to this tense's being a dependent tense-i.e., one which needs another tense to set the initial time reference-not to any irrealis-type meaning.…”

“…These are often called dependent tenses or subjunctives (especially for Southern Bantu languages, cf. Doke, 1927;Cole, 1955;Doke and Mofokeng, 1957;Guma, 1971;Posthumus, 1991). The so-called "narrative tenses" form part of this group and typically indicate the continuation of a macro-event with sub-events or a contextuallyconnected sequence of events, like the sub-events of a typical story or a narrative description of steps taken toward an outcome (e.g., I planted the maize, then I watered it, then I. .…”