Helping Hand or a Hurdle Too High? An Evaluation Of Developmental Coursework at Arkansas\u27s Flagship University

High school graduation serves as an important gateway to increased professional opportunities. Not only does a high school graduate improve the national economy, a high school diploma is the key to opening the door to college. However, obtaining a high school degree does not necessarily ensure college readiness. In fact, many high school graduates are not prepared for college coursework, but still apply to and attend college in our college for all system. The class of 2013 saw only 38 percent of students test at a level considered prepared for college on the reading portion of the NAEP, but the problem is 66 percent of these students went on to enroll in college (Petrilli, 2016). In order to rectify this situation of unprepared students entering post-secondary education, colleges have implemented developmental coursework policies to prepare students for college-level coursework. Here, we add to the literature by examining the impacts of developmental coursework on students at Arkansas’s flagship public institution. We use a regression discontinuity design to examine multiple bandwidths of student-level observations for first-time enrollees from 2003-2014. The full sample includes 40,395 first-time enrollees for the time period of interest, 92 percent reported scores for each of the three ACT sections that determine recommendation for remediation. Using marginal effects to predict outcomes, we find that students recommended to developmental math courses are less likely to persist in college and less likely to graduate in 4 years after enrollment. We find that students recommended for developmental English coursework were more likely to persist into the second semester and year of college but were less likely to graduate in 4 years. We conclude that developmental coursework at the University of Arkansas, while having mixed impacts on students, could be due to the quality of student choosing to attend the state’s flagship institution and the state’s policies tied to opting-in and placing-out of developmental courses

An Evaluation of Arkansas’ Developmental Coursework Policy at Postsecondary Institutions

This dissertation is an evaluation of the impacts of assignment to and enrollment in postsecondary remedial coursework in the state of Arkansas. In this study, I evaluate the impacts of the policy on students’ academic achievement and attainment as measured by graduation rates and persistence. I include subgroup analyses of these outcomes to determine whether there are heterogeneous effects for students enrolling at two-year or four-year institutions, institutions with the highest remediation rates, and students of different races, genders, and baseline achievement. Like previous evaluations of remediation in other settings, the results here point to negative impacts of remediation on students’ persistence and earning a degree, regardless of institution type. Secondary analyses show that students who were assigned to English Language Arts remediation but tested out of the course earned higher grades in the first college-level course compared to their peers who were unable to test out of remedial courses. There was no detectable difference in course performance for math students. Similarly, there were few substantial differences in noncognitive skills for students enrolling in remedial English courses compared to their nonremedial peers. These studies contribute to the literature on college remediation policies by providing the first rigorous evaluation of the policy in Arkansas, a comparison of noncognitive skills of remedial and nonremedial students, and a descriptive analysis of course performance for students who avoided remedial courses

You Can Often Get What You Want: Assessing the Match between Parent Preferences and Private Schools of Choice

Providing parents choices in education has become an increasingly popular instrument for reforming education in the United States. While existing research on parent satisfaction in private school choice programs shows that parents are satisfied with the schools they have chosen, there is not much to explain their satisfaction. Previous research using parent surveys asks parents to rate and/or grade their school of choice, while comparing their response to their thoughts on their previous public school. This paper reports new empirical evidence that looks to offer a possible explanation for parents’ satisfaction. Using data from the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, we look to analyze whether or not parents get what they choose for when given the opportunity to choose a private school. Our analysis makes use of survey responses from parents that can be matched to students and then matched to principals. In total, there were 7,338 parents who received a survey. Of these, 3,226 parents completed a survey. In total, there were 1,868 students who responded to surveys. Parents were matched to MPCP students using a unique child ID, resulting in 1,856 parents who were matched to students. These were then matched to principals representing 123 schools participating in the MPCP. Our analysis of the MPCP examines the probability of a parent choosing a school that ranked at least above average on the specific characteristic they had listed as most important to their school choice. Since a school having a specific characteristic is a binary variable, we used Logit as the functional form of the regression equation in order to estimate the probability that parents get what they choose for