Panel Paper: Experimentally Estimated Impacts of a School Choice Intervention on Long-Term Educational Outcomes: The Effects of School Vouchers on College Enrollment

Friday, November 8, 2013 : 1:15 PM
Scott (Westin Georgetown)

*Names in bold indicate Presenter

Matthew M. Chingos, Brookings Institution and Paul E. Peterson, Harvard University
We conduct a long-term follow-up evaluation of the New York School Choice Scholarships Foundation Program, which in the spring of 1997 offered three-year scholarships worth up to a maximum of $1,400 annually to as many as 1,000 low-income families. Scholarships were awarded by lottery, and an original evaluation compared the test-score performance of the treatment and control groups. We extend that evaluation by linking student data to college enrollment information maintained by the National Student Clearinghouse, which we are able to do for 99 percent of participants. Overall, we find no significant effects of the offer of a school voucher on college enrollment. However, we find evidence of large, significant impacts for African-American students, and fairly small but statistically insignificant impacts for Hispanic students. Intent-to-treat estimates indicate that a voucher offer increased the overall college enrollment rate of African Americans by 7.1 percentage points, with instrumental variables estimates indicating that using the voucher to attend private school had an impact of 8.7 percentage points. Effects were concentrated at private-four year colleges and at selective colleges.

Full Paper: