The Impact of the Small Stand-Alone Early College Model

• In Event: Moving From the "Boutique" to the "Broad": Scaling up Early College Efforts in Different Settings

Abstract

As noted in the summary, the early college work started primarily with small, stand-alone early colleges located on college campuses. This paper will present an overview of the original model as it was implemented nationally and with a specific focus on North Carolina. The paper will then present results from a longitudinal experimental study of the model, focusing on the impacts of the model on high school and postsecondary outcomes including: successful college preparatory course-taking, college credits earned while in high school, high school graduation rates, and students’ enrollment in postsecondary education.
Located in North Carolina (which has the largest number of early colleges in the country), this study is a multi-site randomized field trial that capitalizes on the fact that some schools used lotteries to select students. From a pool of eligible students, early colleges enrolled students based on random assignment, and the study compares the students who were assigned to the treatment group (early college) with students who were assigned to the control group (generally the traditional high school in the district or “business as usual”). The sample analyzed for this presentation includes a total of 1,651 students who applied to 12 different early colleges and enrolled in 9th grade in the 2005-2006, 2006-2007, 2007-2008, and 2008-2009 school years. These 12 schools enrolled a total of 18 cohorts of students, with five schools enrolling multiple cohorts. For the final paper, we hope to update these findings with results for an additional 1,000 students who enrolled in school in the 2009-2010 school year.
The impacts of early colleges on these outcomes are estimated within an Intent-to-Treat framework, supplemented by an estimate for the Local Average Treatment Effect (LATE) (Gennetian, Morris, Bos, & Bloom, 2005). For each outcome, we calculated unadjusted means for the treatment and control groups. We then calculated adjusted impact estimates using multivariate linear regression models that include site indicators (or site fixed effects), interaction of the treatment indicator with the site indicators (site level impact estimates), and baseline student characteristics.
Analysis of these data show that early college students were more likely to have successfully completed the high school courses required for entrance into college (a 10 percentage point impact). They also attained an average of 22 college credits by the end of 12th grade compared to less than 3 college credits for the control group. Early college students graduated from high school at a rate that was 4 percentage points higher than the control group and had enrolled in postsecondary education at a rate that was 15 percentage points higher.

Authors

• Julie A. Edmunds, University of North Carolina - Greensboro

• Fatih Unlu, Abt Associates Inc.

• Elizabeth J. Glennie, RTI International

• Larry Bernstein, Northeastern University

• Jane Furey