Ready for College? Examining the Effectiveness of Targeted Interventions in High School

Abstract

Kentucky’s Targeted Interventions (TI) program is a statewide intervention intended to prepare non-college-ready high school students for college-level coursework. Using a difference-in-regression discontinuity design, we find that TI reduces the likelihood that students enroll in remedial courses by 8 to 10 percentage points in math. These effects are similar or stronger among students who are eligible for free/reduced-price lunch, students with remediation needs in multiple subjects, and students in lower performing schools. TI also increases the likelihood that students enroll in and pass college math before the end of the first year in 4-year universities by 4 percentage points and by 9 percentage points among free/reduced-price lunch eligible students. However, we do not find evidence of TI affecting credit accumulation or persistence.

The Impact of Transition Intervention in High School on Pathways Through College

“…In addition to the usual assumptions of an RD—the existence of significant discontinuity in treatment receipt at the cutoff, the integrity of the running variable, no differential sample attrition at the cutoff—DiRD also assumes that the discontinuity in student outcomes at the cutoff due to college placement policies would have remained constant throughout the study period in the absence of TI. As demonstrated in Xu et al (2022), which uses the same identification approach we rely on here, there is no evidence that any of these assumptions are violated. The discontinuity in TI participation around ACT cutoffs is about 40 percentage points for both subjects.…”

“…Consistent with the integrity of the running variable, key baseline covariates are continuous at the cutoff. Using student gender, race/ethnicity, and FRL eligibility as the outcome, Xu et al (2022) estimated the DiRD model as described above and found no detectable discontinuity at the cutoff except for the percentage of female students, where the difference is equivalent to about 0.10 standard deviation. Controlling for gender (as well as other covariates) in the DiRD model produces no meaningful change in estimated TI effects on college outcomes.…”

“…As a further test for the DiRD assumption that the college placement policy effect would have remained constant in the absence of TI, Xu et al (2022) conducted a falsification test by estimating TI “effects” away from the actual cutoff. Like the math cutoff of 19, a cutoff of 22 has also been used by colleges in Kentucky to place students in college math courses (albeit at a higher level).…”

“…Prior research has found mixed results about the impact of transition programs, such as the one in Kentucky. In looking at Kentucky’s model, Xu et al (2022) found that, consistent with the goals of the program, TI reduced the likelihood that Kentucky students would enroll in college DE by 8 to 10 percentage points in math in both 2- and 4-year institutions among students who just missed the college-ready benchmark in 11th grade, and that the cost of the program was estimated to be about $600 per student (Levin et al, 2020). In further exploration, the authors also found that TI increased the rate at which these students pass introductory college math within the first year of college by 4 percentage points in 4-year institutions.…”

“…In this paper, we explored a statewide transition intervention program in Kentucky—Targeted Interventions (TI)—and its impact on longer term college outcomes. This is an especially interesting case to investigate because there is evidence (Xu et al, 2022) that the Kentucky TI program has reduced the need for DE of initially low-achieving students who attend college in the state. To our knowledge, this is the first study of a statewide transition intervention program in the U.S. to explore longer term college outcomes, including the likelihood of transferring from a 2-year to a 4-year college and obtaining enough credits to earn a college degree.…”