National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

This project analyzes the impact of integration on Black, Hispanic, Asian, and White students' outcomes using the applicant records of the 50-year-old Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO) voluntary desegregation busing program. Findings from the study will increase understanding of the impact of reduced racial isolation and of access to high-performing suburban schools for urban students of color.

In this project, researchers investigate whether an intervention that provides financial aid information to college students increases receipt of financial aid, enrollment on a full-time (versus part-time) basis, persistence from semester to semester, and degree completion. If proven beneficial, the intervention could be widely replicated based on information that is already available in federal and institutional databases. The goal of the intervention is to alter students' perceptions of th...

Enrollment in charter schools has tripled over the last decade, and more states are making it easier to open charter schools. These two factors make it likely that growth in charter school enrollment will continue in the coming years. The goal of the proposed research plan is to use a diverse sample of charter schools from three states to determine what makes some charter schools reliably succeed at increasing learning while others do not. A key feature of this study is that charter enrollme...

The purpose of the proposed research is to test the effects of simplifying the financial aid application process and providing assistance at scale. Findings from previous efficacy studies found that these two supports led to a 20 percent increase in college attendance in our target areas in Ohio and North Carolina. The team will recruit participants in this scale-up evaluation from the 3.5 million individuals who use free tax-filing services, and will randomly assign families to different ty...

In acknowledgement of the growing importance of family savings in the face of rapidly increasing college costs, a major focus of recent federal and state financial aid policies has been to encourage families to save for themselves. However, few families actually utilize these plans to save for college, and little is known about why. The purpose of this research is to test several possible ways to influence participation in college savings plans and subsequent savings behavior.

Two recent field trials (Cohen et al. 2006; Good, Aronson, and Inzlicht 2003) suggest that modest interventions designed to buffer middle-school students against stereotype threat are effective at closing achievement gaps (e.g., raising minority student achievement by as much as 0.50 standard deviations, which is roughly equivalent to 50 percent of the minority achievement gap). This study replicates the Cohen et al. (2006) study using a more comprehensive set of student-level outcome measur...