Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The rate of college enrollment has increased since the early 1980’s (NCES, 2013), but increases in degree attainment rates have not increased commensurately (Roderick et al, 2009). One way that states are seeking to improve college readiness is through a greater emphasis on college-preparatory and college-level coursework. Jackson (2010, 2014) identified causal effects on academic and labor market outcomes of a program that increased Advanced Placement (AP) course participation for students attending predominantly minority, urban schools in Texas. Jackson (2014) concluded that the program’s success was related to several elements: incentives to students and teachers for AP exam success, expansion of course-taking, and more intensive advising. The success of the Texas program has served as a model for AP expansion programs in other states (Wakelyn, 2009; Holstead, 2010).

                  I use administrative data to study the impact of one such AP expansion program, Advance Kentucky. It began in 2008 and added schools at a rate of 12 per year. By 2015, more than 40% of Kentucky students attended a participating school. Following Jackson (2014), I exploit the staggered timing of the program’s rollout and fit difference-in-differences models that compare outcomes for successive cohorts within participating schools. I find that the program caused the percentage of students ever enrolling in a targeted AP course to increase from approximately 10% to 25%, with larger effects for higher-achieving students. Estimated effects on ACT scores were not statistically different from zero. The probability of college enrollment upon graduation was unaffected, but the effect on persistence beyond freshman year was -2 percentage points. Conditional on college enrollment, this implies a decrease in the probability of persisting from .72 to .67.
     Negative effects on college persistence were not concentrated among the highest-achieving quintile of students—whose AP course enrollment increased most—suggesting that greater AP course participation was not the direct cause for the negative effect. I present evidence on four possible mechanisms: (1) changes in peer composition for college-bound students who didn’t enroll in newly available AP courses, (2) changes in teacher quality for college-bound students who didn’t enroll in newly available AP courses, (3) an increase in underprepared students enrolling in Advanced Placement coursework, and (4) an enrollment shift toward private colleges.

                  Notably, although the Texas program improved rates of initial college enrollment and earnings later in life, it did not lead to greater rates of postsecondary degree completion (Jackson, 2014). Taken together, these findings call into question the prospect that AP expansion programs like Kentucky’s and Texas’s will improve postsecondary completion rates.