Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

A postsecondary credential is a strong predictor of success in the labor market and the returns to college are large. Avery and Turner (2012) estimate that a college graduate, on average, will have earned $1.2 million net of tuition at age 64 while a high school graduate at the same age will have earned $785,000.(Goldin and Katz, 2007) While several studies have explored the benefits of a university education for first time college students little attention has been given to the benefits for students that transfer from two-year community colleges to four-year universities. In Texas alone, there have been 4.77 million applications to four-year universities since 2000 and 1.45 million were from transferring students. It is surprising how little we know about transferring students considering that they make up such a large proportion of the college application pool. Texas A&M University has well defined GPA requirements for transferring students. I take advantage of GPA cut-offs necessary for transfer admission and use regression discontinuity to estimate the causal returns of transfer admission from a community college. I use rich administrative data from the Texas Education Agency, Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, and Texas Workforce Commission provided by the Texas Schools Project at University of Texas at Dallas. The structure of this data allows me to track individual level student transitions, degree completion, time to degree completion, and post-college earnings for both treatment and counterfactual groups. I examine the returns from admission relative to students that transfer to tier one universities in Texas, other non-tier one universities in Texas, and students who fail to gain admission at a four-year university in Texas. My preliminary results suggest that being above the GPA cut-off increases the probability of admission by eight to ten percentage points. I also find that marginally admitted students are are more likely to graduate with a bachelors degree within 4 years of transfer.