More than Dollars for Scholars: The Impact of the Dell Scholars Program on College Access, Persistence and Degree Attainment

Although college enrollment rates have increased substantially over the last several decades, socioeconomic inequalities in college completion have actually widened over time. A critical question, therefore, is how to support low-income and first-generation students to succeed in college after they matriculate. We investigate the impact of the Dell Scholars Program which provides a combination of generous financial support and individualized advising to scholarship recipients before and throughout their postsecondary enrollment. The program's design is motivated by a theory of action that, in order to meaningfully increase the share of lower-income students who earn a college degree, it is necessary both to address financial constraints students face and to provide ongoing support for the academic, cultural and other challenges that students experience during their college careers. We isolate the unique impact of the program on college completion by capitalizing on an arbitrary cutoff in the program's algorithmic selection process. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that although being named a Dell Scholar has no impact on initial college enrollment or early college persistence, scholars at the margin of eligibility are significantly more likely to earn a bachelor's degree on-time or six years after high school graduation. These impacts are sizeable and represent a nearly 25 percent or greater increase in both four- and six-year bachelor's attainment. The program is resource intensive. Yet, back-of-theenvelope calculations indicate that the Dell Scholars Program has a positive rate of return

Nudging Students Beyond the FAFSA: The Impact of University Outreach on Financial Aid Behaviors and Outcomes

A growing body of research indicates that proactive outreach from high schools and college access organizations about college preparation tasks, and specifically focusing on completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), results in increased college enrollment. Comparatively less attention has been paid to the role of colleges and universities in this outreach and outreach relating to additional financial aid barriers that students face while applying to college, such as the CSS PROFILE form. In this article we investigated, through an inter-university collaboration, the effect of sending targeted, semi-personalized text messages to students during the college application process about important financial aid deadlines, making salient the specific forms required and prompting students to plan specific times to complete these tasks. The intervention increased CSS PROFILE filing by 3.1-4.3 percentage points, where the estimates and their significance varied depending on the comparison group. Impacts on student enrollment did not accompany these filing impacts. Results from our collaboration support the idea that colleges and universities have an important role to play in outreach to applicants relating to important financial aid tasks. The paper includes a discussion of the promises and challenges of this outreach with recommendations for practitioners

Looking Beyond Enrollment: The Causal Effect of Need-Based

ABSTRACT Gaps in average college success among students of differing backgrounds have persisted in the United States for decades. One of the primary ways that federal and state governments have attempted to ameliorate such gaps is by providing need-based financial aid to low-income students. In this paper, we examine the impact of eligibility for the Florida Student Access Grant (FSAG) on a range of college outcomes. Exploiting the cutoff in the index used to measure a family's ability to pay for college and determine grant eligibility, we utilize a regression-discontinuity (RD) strategy to estimate the causal effect of being eligible for the grant. We investigate whether being eligible for a need-based grant increases the probability that students enter college, remain continuously enrolled, accumulate more credits toward graduation, and ultimately earn a degree. Similar to other studies, we find that grant eligibility had a positive effect on whether students attended a public, four-year university. Moreover, grant aid increased short-term persistence and the cumulative number of credits students earned over time. Most importantly, we find that FSAG increased the likelihood of bachelor's degree receipt within six years at a public college or university by 22 percent among students near the eligibility cut-off. The effects are largest for students who had higher GPAs in high school

A trickle or a torrent? Understanding the extent of summer “melt” among college-intending high school graduates. Social Science Quarterly. doi:10.1111/ssqu.12032

Objectives. The object of this study was to examine whether college-intending, low-income high school graduates are particularly susceptible to having their postsecondary education plans change, or even fall apart, during the summer after high school graduation. College access research has largely overlooked this time period. Yet, previous research indicates that a sizeable share of low-income students who had paid college deposits reconsidered where, and even whether, to enroll in the months following graduation. We assess the extent to which this phenomenon-commonly referred to as "summer melt"-is broadly generalizable. Methods. We employ two data sources, a national survey and administrative data from a large metropolitan area, and regression analysis to estimate the prevalence of summer melt. Results. Our analyses reveal summer melt rates of sizeable magnitude: ranging from 8 to 40 percent. Conclusions. Our results indicate that low-income, college-intending students experience high rates of summer attrition from the college pipeline. Given the goal of improving the flow of low-income students to and through college, it is imperative to investigate how to effectively intervene and mitigate summer melt. The share of students enrolling in higher education in the United States has increased steadily in recent decades. Nevertheless, enrollment rates of low-income youth continue to lag behind those of their wealthier peers. Research seeking to explain these persistent-and widening-gaps has focused predominantly on student characteristics, academic preparation, and access to * Direct correspondence to Benjamin L. Castleman (now at the University of Virginia), Curry School of Education, The University of Virginia, P.O. Box 400265, Charlottesville, VA 22904 [email protected] or Lindsay C. Page, Center for Education Policy Research, Harvard University, 50 Church, Cambridge, MA 02138 [email protected] . We will share all coding and all data from uAspire for replication purposes. We are unable to provide restricted-use ELS:2002 data. We gratefully acknowledge uAspire for providing us data on applicants to their Last Dollar Scholarship program and further acknowledge Bob GianninoRacine, Erin Cox, and Claire Dennison at uAspire for their collaborative partnership in this project. We are grateful to Christopher Avery and Bridget Terry Long for their support and guidance and to Richard Murnane for providing feedback on previous versions of this article. Finally, we acknowledge Karen Arnold, whose research and guidance led us to further examine the prevalence of summer-specific barriers to college access