@EdWorkingPaper{ai22-565,
title = "The Power of ÒFreeÓ College: Reducing Racial and Socioeconomic Inequalities in College Expectations",
author = "Taylor Odle",
institution = "Annenberg Institute at Brown University",
number = "565",
year = "2022",
month = "April",
URL = "http://www.edworkingpapers.com/ai22-565",
abstract = {Promoting equality in college enrollment and completion must start early in studentsÕ college-going journeys, including with their expectations to first earn a college degree. With a nationally representative sample of high school students, I evaluate the ability of a recent collection of college access policies (place-based ÒpromiseÓ scholarships or ÒfreeÓ college programs) to increase studentsÕ college expectations and test the heterogeneity of these impacts across studentsÕ race and family income. Evidence from a difference-in-differences design and lagged-dependent-variable regressions suggest the introduction of promise programs increased the likelihood a student expected to attain an associate degree or higher by 8.5 to 15.0 percentage points by the end of high school, with larger effects for low-income and racially minoritized students. This study is the first to test the power of ÒfreeÓ college in shaping pre-college studentsÕ educational plans, and, in doing so, not only addresses an existing gap in the literature but also identifies a key mechanism through which many of the positive college-going impacts observed across promise programs in the current literature may in fact originate. Given the rapid proliferation of promise programs across the nation, this study provides policymakers with a fuller view of the potential impacts of these programs, particularly concerning how they influence studentsÕ outcomes along dimensions of race and income.},
}