For years Georgia's HOPE Scholarship program provided full tuition scholarships to high-achieving students. State budgetary shortfalls reduced its generosity in 2011. Under the new rules, only students meeting more rigorous merit-based criteria would retain the original scholarship covering full tuition, now called the Zell Miller Scholarship,…

The past three decades have seen charter schools emerge as a prominent and controversial alternative to traditional public schools. This policy brief examines "Thirty Years of Charter Schools: What Does Lottery-Based Research Tell Us?" which summarizes 40 studies that have used lottery research designs to analyze how charter schools…

Since their inception in 1992, the number of charter schools has grown to more than 6,800 nationally, serving nearly three million students. Various studies have examined charter schools' impacts on test scores, and a few have begun to examine longer-term outcomes including graduation and college attendance. This paper is the first to estimate…

National research indicates that Deaf, Deaf/Blind, and Hard of Hearing students are less likely to finish high school, enroll in college, or find sustainable employment than their hearing peers. Minnesota is one of the few states that provides data to the National Deaf Center, the leading research center in Deaf, Deaf/Blind, or Hard of Hearing and…

In partnership with the Louisiana Department of Education and through a grant from the Walton Family Foundation, Mathematica conducted a study that measured each Louisiana public high school's promotion power, which is a school's effect on the long-term success of its students as indicated by high school graduation, college or career readiness,…

Helping raise the Hispanic college graduation rate is an urgent goal, given the persistently high rate of poverty among Hispanic families, growth of the Hispanic population to account for one in five college-age Americans, and mounting concerns about racial and economic inequality. The question is, how? One potential strategy involves helping high…

In 2011, under the Florida College and Career Readiness Initiative (FCCRI), Florida made college placement testing mandatory for 11th-grade students who had scored in the midrange of its standardized 10th-grade assessment. Those with placement test scores below college-ready were assigned in 12th grade to college readiness and success…

Using value-added models, we find that high schools impact students' self-reported socio-emotional development (SED) by enhancing social well-being and promoting hard work. Conditional on schools' test score impacts, schools that improve SED, reduce school-based arrests, and increase high-school completion, college-going, and college persistence.…

This report builds on the 2013 and 2014 Reports on Unmet Need and Student Success at Maryland Public Four-Year Institutions by providing data on six-year graduation rates for the students in the original 2008 entering cohort. For this report, both descriptive analysis and logistic regression were used to understand the relationship between…

This paper examines the effect of early childhood investments on college enrollment and degree completion. We used the random assignment in Project STAR (the Tennessee Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio experiment) to estimate the effect of smaller classes in primary school on college entry, college choice, and degree completion. We improve on…

Educators are increasingly focused on ensuring that students experience a rigorous curriculum in high school and graduate college and career ready. One way of introducing rigorous course work is to have students take college-level work, often in the form of either an AP® course and exam or a dual enrollment course. This study compared the outcomes…

Academic intensity or academic rigor of students' high school curriculum is positively related to several college outcomes including the avoidance of remediation and graduation attainment. However, research on academic rigor has been limited possibly due to the difficulty in obtaining a quantitative measure applicable across schools and districts.…

The 2016 Nebraska Higher Education Progress Report is the 12th annual progress report designed to provide the Nebraska Legislature with comparative statistics to monitor and evaluate progress toward achieving three key priorities for Nebraska's postsecondary education system. These priorities were developed by the 2003 LR 174 Higher Education Task…

This "College Choice Report" is part of a report series that focuses on the ACT-tested high school graduating class of 2013. The focus of this year's "College Choice Report" is students' selection of a college major or program of study among the ACT-tested high school graduating class of 2013. This year's report is provided in…

Districts now have access to a wealth of new information that can help target students with appropriate supports and bring focus and coherence to college readiness efforts. However, the abundance of data has brought its own challenges. Schools and school systems are often overwhelmed with the amount of data available. The capacity of districts to…