The Effects of Mandatory and Free College Admission Testing on College Enrollment and Completion

Vansuch, Mary (2017): The Effects of Mandatory and Free College Admission Testing on College Enrollment and Completion.

Abstract

Between the years 2001 and 2015, twenty-three states and the District of Columbia implemented a policy providing mandatory and free college admission exams (ACT or SAT) to all public high school juniors. As such, the policy reduced to zero out of pocket expenses for exam fees, and likely reduced out-of-pocket expenses for exam preparation, because schools might have been induced to provide such a service in-house. The policy also reduced the time cost of test taking because the test is administered during class time and at a student’s school. Because the mandatory exam is administered during the junior year, the policy may also have increased the amount of information a student has about her college prospects earlier on in her decision making process. In this paper I hypothesize that the decreased costs and increased information may induce more students to apply to and enroll in college. I use both college-level longitudinal data (IPEDS) along with cross-sectional student-level data (ACS) to test these predictions. Specifically, I exploit the fact that not all states implemented the policy and that those which did so implemented the policy at different points in time. In the college-level analysis, I find that the average college saw an increase in about 88 enrolled students and 460 applications from the policy without any effect on their graduation rates. In the individual-level analysis, I find that treated individuals have approximately 1.03 times the odds of untreated individuals of attending college. In the appendix I propose a model for the decision to apply, enroll, and complete college.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: economics of education, education, educational attainment, college admissions, economics, economics of decision making, behavioral economics, act, sat
• Subjects: D - Microeconomics > D6 - Welfare Economics; D - Microeconomics > D6 - Welfare Economics > D61 - Allocative Efficiency ; Cost-Benefit Analysis; D - Microeconomics > D6 - Welfare Economics > D63 - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement; H - Public Economics > H0 - General; H - Public Economics > H4 - Publicly Provided Goods; H - Public Economics > H7 - State and Local Government ; Intergovernmental Relations; I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I2 - Education and Research Institutions; I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I2 - Education and Research Institutions > I20 - General; I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I2 - Education and Research Institutions > I21 - Analysis of Education; I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I2 - Education and Research Institutions > I22 - Educational Finance ; Financial Aid; I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I2 - Education and Research Institutions > I24 - Education and Inequality; I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I2 - Education and Research Institutions > I28 - Government Policy

References

“Average ACT Scores by Grade at Time of Testing.” 2015. ACT Research & Policy. http://www.act.org/content/- dam/act/unsecured/documents/Info-Brief-2014-21.pdf.

Avery, Christopher, and Thomas J. Kane. 2004. “Student Perceptions of College Opportunities. The Boston COACH Program.” NBER, September, 355–94.

Carl Straumsheim. 2017. “IPEDS Survey Misses Thousands of Online Students, but Often Counts Too Many.” Inside Higher Ed. Accessed March 28. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/09/26/ipeds-survey-misses-thousands-online-students-often-counts-too-many.

Carnevale, Anthony P, Stephen J Rose, and Ban Cheah. 2011. The College Payoff: Education, Occupations, Lifetime Earnings. Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED524299.

Cohn, D’Vera, and Rich Morin. 2008. “Who Moves? Who Stays Put? Where’s Home?” Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project. December 17. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2008/12/17/who-moves-who-stays-put-wheres-home/.

Delaney, Anne Marie. 1998. Parental Income and Students’ College Choice Process [Microform] : Research Findings To Guide Recruitment Strategies. AIR 1998 Annual Forum Paper / Anne Marie Delaney. [Washington D.C.]: Distributed by ERIC Clearinghouse. http://www.eric.ed.gov/contentdelivery/servlet/- ERICServlet?accno=ED422810.

Desilver, Drew. 2014. “College Enrollment among Low-Income Students Still Trails Richer Groups.” Pew Research Center. January 15. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/01/15/college-enrollment-among-low-income-students-still-trails-richer-groups/.

Engle, Jennifer, and Vincent Tinto. 2008. Moving Beyond Access: College Success for Low-Income, First-Generation Students. Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED504448.

“Executive Summary of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.” 2007. Legislative Materials; Abstracts. November 20. https://www2.ed.gov/nclb/overview/intro/execsumm.html.

Gebeloff, Gregor Aisch, Robert, and Kevin Quealy. 2014. “Where We Came From and Where We Went, State by State.” The New York Times, August 14. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/upshot/where-people-in-each-state-were-born.html.

Goodman, Sarena. 2016. “Learning from the Test: Raising Selective College Enrollment by Providing Information.” The Review of Economics and Statistics 98 (4): 671–84.

Huchton, Marie. 2011. “Predicting 11th Grade Colorado ACT Performance Using 9th and 10th Grade CSAP Results.” https://www.cde.state.co.us/sites/default/files/documents/research/download/pdf/predictingactusingcsap_final.pdf.

Hurwitz, Michael, Jonathan Smith, Sunny Xinchun Niu, and Jessica Howell. 2015. “The Maine Question: How Is Four-Year College Enrollment Affected by Mandatory College Entrance Exams?” SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 2757209. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2757209.

Klasik, Daniel. 2016. “The ACT of Enrollment.” Educational Researcher, June. doi:10.3102/0013189X12474065.

Lewin, Tamar. 2013. “More Students Are Taking Both the ACT and SAT.” The New York Times, August 2. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/more-students-are-taking-both-the-act-and-sat.html.

Long, Bridget. 2004. “How Have College Decisions Changed over Time? An Application of the Conditional Logistic Choice Model.” Journal of Econometrics 121 (1–2): 271–96.

Mayer, Susan E., Ariel Kalil, Philip Oreopoulos, and Sebastian Gallegos. 2015. “Using Behavioral Insights to Increase Parental Engagement: The Parents and Children Together (PACT) Intervention.” Working Paper 21602. National Bureau of Economic Research. doi:10.3386/w21602.

National Center for Education Statistics. 2017. “IPEDS : Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.” https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/.

Pallais, Amanda. 2013. “Small Differences That Matter: Mistakes in Applying to College.” Working Paper 19480. National Bureau of Economic Research. http://www.nber.org/papers/w19480.

“Published Prices — National for Trends in College Pricing - Trends in Higher Education - The College Board.” 2017. Accessed March 29. https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tables/published-prices-national.

Saget, Bedel. 2013. “Where the SAT and ACT Dominate.” The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/- interactive/2013/08/04/education/edlife/where-the-sat-and-act-dominate.html.

Shaul, Marnie S. |Ganson. 2005. “The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001: The Federal Government’s Role in Strengthening Accountability for Student Performance.” Review of Research in Education 29: 151–65.

Soldner, Matthew, Cameron Smither, Kelle Parsons, and Audrey Peek. 2016. “Toward Improved Measurements of Student Persistence and Completion.” Text. American Institutes for Research. May 16. http://www.air.org/resource/toward-improved-measurements-student-persistence-and-completion.

“State Reports – 2016 SAT Suite Program Results – The College Board.” 2017. Accessed March 28. https://reports.collegeboard.org/sat-suite-program-results/class-of-2016-results/state-reports.

Steven Ruggles, Katie Genadek, Ronald Goeken, Josiah Grover, and Matthew Sobek. 2015. “Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 6.0 [Dataset].” Minneapolis, University of Minnesota. doi:http://doi.org/- 10.18128/D010.V6.0.

The College Board. 2017. “Published Prices: National for Trends in College Pricing, Trends in Higher Education.” Accessed February 13. https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tables/published-prices-national.

“The Condition of College and Career Readiness 2016.” 2017. ACT. Accessed March 28. http://www.act.org/- content/act/en/research/condition-of-college-and-career-readiness-2016.html.

US Department of Commerce, B. E. A. 2017. “Bureau of Economic Analysis.” Accessed February 13. https://www.bea.gov/regional/.