Search

Objective: In 2009, the Kentucky General Assembly found unacceptable and costly the ongoing high numbers of high school students requiring remediation once they enter higher education. The state passed legislation to better align secondary and college education, establishing a diagnostic cycle that would become its Targeted Interventions (TI) program. Using 11 years of panel data, this study tracked college progression of seven cohorts of students in order to estimate the impacts of this program. Method: Using student-level administrative data from the state of Kentucky that tracks students from high school through college, a difference-in-regression-discontinuity design was used to compare how students just below college readiness benchmarks fared relative to those just above once TI was implemented. Results: The TI program significantly increased the likelihood that students took at least 15 credits during their first term, a key predictive measure for college completion. However, these early effects did not translate into detectable impacts on the likelihood of earning enough credits to graduate from college or likelihood of transfers from a 2-year to a 4-year college. One possible explanation for this pattern is that TI appears to have crowded out other core courses in high school, especially in math, without increasing total instructional time. Findings suggest that the standards used by high schools to judge student progress toward college readiness may be consistent with the skills needed to place out of developmental courses, but not sufficient to better prepare students for college-level instruction. Contributions: To our knowledge, this is the first study to explore how TI shapes longer term college outcomes. The transition curriculum, while helping students avoid the need for college developmental courses, did not help a measurable share of students develop necessary skills to progress through college relative to what they would have otherwise taken. A possible explanation for these findings is that high school-to-college transition interventions that do not increase total instruction time do not sufficiently move the needle on the college preparedness among high school graduates. For states concerned with the number of students entering college deemed not college ready, it appears that high school-to-college transition interventions that supplant instead of supplement regular high school curriculum have a limited scope for impact on long-run college success.

This paper uses student-level data to investigate how the college application behavior of underrepresented minorities (URMs) changed in response to the 1998 end of affirmative action in admissions at the University of California (UC). We show that all URMs experienced a drop in their probability of admission to at least one UC campus. However, the relative decline in URM SAT score-sending rates--our proxy for application rates--was small and concentrated at Berkeley and UCLA among underrepresented minorities who experienced the largest relative drop in their predicted probability of admission. In addition, we find some evidence of a shift toward less-selective UC campuses rather than out of the UC system. Overall, our paper highlights the stability of URM application behavior in the face of substantial declines in their admission rates.

Using institutional data on race-specific college enrollment and completion, I examine whether minority students were less likely to enroll in a four-year public college or receive a degree following a statewide affirmative action ban. As in previous studies, I find that black and Hispanic enrollment dropped at the top institutions; however, there is little evidence that overall black enrollment at public universities fell. Finally, despite evidence that fewer blacks and Hispanics graduated from college following a ban, the effects on graduation rates are very noisy. (Contains 2 figures, 6 tables and 17 footnotes.)

This study examines the extent to which students obtain postsecondary credentials in the c areer technical education (CTE) fields of focus they choose in high school. Using school fixed-effects models, we find that focusing on a particular CTE field in high school is associated with an increased probability of enrolling and obtaining a postsecondary credential in that field. The secondary–postsecondary relationship varies across focus areas, and it is strongest in health (increase of 12.5 percentage points), which is disproportionately chosen by females. Across all fields of focus, however, most students enroll and obtain a postsecondary credential in fields that are different from what they focused on in high school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kentucky's Targeted Interventions (TI) program is a statewide intervention intended to prepare non-college-ready high school students for college-level coursework. Using a difference-in-regression discontinuity design, we find that TI reduces the likelihood that students enroll in remedial courses by 8 to 10 percentage points in math. These effects are similar or stronger among students who are eligible for free/reduced-price lunch, students with remediation needs in multiple subjects, and students in lower performing schools. TI also increases the likelihood that students enroll in and pass college math before the end of the first year in 4-year universities by 4 percentage points and by 9 percentage points among free/reduced-price lunch eligible students. However, we do not find evidence of TI affecting credit accumulation or persistence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]