College Enrollment and Completion Among Nationally Recognized High‐Achieving Hispanic Students

Abstract

Hispanic high school graduates have lower college completion rates than academically similar white students. As Hispanic students have been theorized to be more constrained in the college search and selection process, one potential policy lever is to increase the set of colleges to which these students apply and attend. In this paper, we investigate the impacts of the College Board's National Hispanic Recognition Program (NHRP), which recognizes the highest‐scoring 11th‐grade Hispanic students on the PSAT/NMSQT, as a mechanism of improving college choice and completion. The program not only informs students about their relative ability, but it also enables colleges to identify, recruit, and offer enrollment incentives. Overall, we find that the program has strong effects on college attendance patterns, shifting students from two‐year to four‐year institutions, as well as to colleges that are out‐of‐state and public flagships, all areas where Hispanic attendance has lagged. NHRP shifts the geographic distribution of where students earn their degree, and increases overall bachelor's completion among Hispanic students who traditionally have had lower rates of success. These results demonstrate that college outreach can have significant impacts on the enrollment choices of Hispanic students and can serve as a policy lever for colleges looking to draw academically talented students.

A National‐Level Informational Experiment to Promote Enrollment in Selective Colleges

“…The College Board was also comfortable providing to students publicly available data on the relative costs or selectivity of various colleges and advocating broadly for the importance of attending a more selective college, but did not want to take a role in promoting specific institutions as being more meritorious. College outreach or direct service programs, which provide a more intensive but human touch working directly with students, may be more efficacious than information‐based initiatives in substantially altering college application behaviors, potentially through advising students towards specific institutions (Barr & Castleman, 2018; Gurantz et al., 2017; Gurantz et al., 2020; Sullivan et al., 2019). In general, research suggests that simply providing information is less effective than interventions that provide direct application assistance (Bettinger et al., 2012; Finkelstein & Notowidigdo, 2019).…”

Impacts of State Aid for Nontraditional Students on Educational and Labor Market Outcomes

“…One substantive difference to both is that the Competitive award does not guarantee aid to all who meet a transparent set of criteria, thus limiting awards to a small subset of total applicants. Financial transparency seems to be a hallmark of successful aid and outreach programs (Bartik, Hershbein, & Lachowska, forthcoming;Dynarski, Libassi, Michelmore, & Owen, 2018;Gurantz, Hurwitz, & Smith, 2017). Students who receive the aid are not just older and low-income, but most are already enrolled in college with relatively high GPAs.…”

Impacts of College Board’s RYCP Campaign on Postsecondary Enrollment

“…Given the influence of neighborhood, family, and peers in the college selection process, the type of information we provided may not have been sufficiently novel or compelling to change student behavior. College outreach or direct service programs, who provide a more intensive but human touch working directly with students, may be more efficacious than information-based initiatives in substantially altering college application behaviors (Barr & Castleman, 2016;Gurantz et al, 2017;Howell, Hurwitz, & Smith, 2018;Page et al, 2017). If we hope that predominately information driven interventions are to move the needle on enrollment, we may need improved data using both individual-level information on students' preferences combined with detailed information on college-specific offerings or strengths.…”

“…A key challenge in promoting enrollment at selective institutions is the multi-step nature of the process, as we must induce students to incorporate new information and alter their application patterns, while then relying on colleges with historically low admission rates changing their acceptance decisions. Particularly for low-income students, these colleges might also need to provide financial or other supports to induce them to enroll (Dynarski et al, 2018;Gurantz, Hurwitz, & Smith, 2017). Prior interventions have spanned from the relatively inexpensive provision of information to more expensive supports that involve one-on-one counseling or other actions that would be more difficult to implement at scale.…”