Childhood Educational Interventions: Experimental Evidence on Postsecondary Impacts

Abstract

The overarching goal of policy interventions for children is to improve long-term outcomes such as educational attainment, health, and earnings. Yet, mostly due to data and budget limitations, numerous evaluations of such programs assess their effectiveness by examining impacts on a variety of short-run outcomes, such as contemporaneous standardized test scores. In this paper, I examine the long-term impacts of two randomly assigned elementary school interventions on kids’ postsecondary attendance, persistence, and completion