How Promise Programs for Two-Year Colleges Affect Different Student Subgroups

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early-Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

Promise programs guarantee financial aid to students who live in a particular geographic area (Miller-Adams, 2015). Although Promise programs have been in place in the United States for nearly two decades, they have garnered greater attention in recent years. One reason for this heightened focus is their diffusion, particularly at the state level (e.g., in Tennessee, Minnesota, New York, and Oregon). Promise programs are adopted to increase educational attainment in the region and, in many cases, to revitalize and develop the local community (Miller-Adams, 2015). An exact count of Promise programs is elusive, since programs are sprouting rapidly and definitions of Promise programs vary. According to one inventory, as of late 2017, at least 289 programs were classified as Promise programs (Perna & Leigh, in press).

Literature on Promise programs is nascent and most research has focused on individual Promise programs, primarily the Kalamazoo Promise in Michigan, the Pittsburgh Promise, and El Dorado Promise in Arkansas. Studies of these programs generally suggest that Promise programs increase overall college enrollments (e.g., Bartik, Herschbein, & Lachowska, 2015; Billings, 2017; Carruthers & Fox, 2016; Cohodes & Goodman, 2014). Our study examines whether there are heterogeneous effects on enrollment of Promise programs nationwide. We explore the effect of Promise programs on initial college enrollment at public, two-year colleges, separating students by gender and race. We create a dataset using a national sample of sub-state Promise programs, combined with data from IPEDS, the College Scorecard, and the Census Bureau, and employ a difference-in-differences design. This study is the first to examine heterogeneity in effects on enrollments across multiple Promise programs in the United States. In addition, this study is one of few to focus on two-year college enrollments. In our analyses, we also account for important program design differences expected to have differential effects on enrollments of different student subgroups.

Our research questions are the following:
1) Do Promise programs have differential impacts on the enrollment of students according to race and gender at public, two-year colleges?
2) Among public, two-year colleges that receive Promise program funds, do Promise design features have differential impacts on the enrollment of student subgroups?
Preliminary findings addressing the first research question suggest that on average,

Authors

• Denisa Gandara, Southern Methodist University

• Amy Li, University of Northern Colorado