Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Servicing the Pipeline: Identifying and Understanding the Role of Appropriately Targeting Supports and Policies to Help Students to and through Post-Secondary Success

(Education)

State, federal, and institutional programs and policies to increase college access and success abound. But for these efforts to be efficient uses of money and time, attention needs to be paid to targeting them to the students who will benefit most from them. In this session, we examine this question of targeting from two angles: using novel measures to identify students who might have otherwise slipped through the cracks and examining the effects of a successful program on specific high needs groups.

In paper #1, we examine if standardized tests of cognitive and non-cognitive measures (such as abstract reasoning, spatial reasoning, leadership, and artistic skills) could help to identify likely high achieving students from traditionally underrepresented groups. The authors find that some such measures could help to identify and better serve low income, underrepresented minority, and rural talent throughout the educational pipeline. In paper #2, we examine if measures of non-cognitive ability could help to better target support services, such as enhanced counseling, in community colleges. The authors find that a rich vector of non-cognitive measures can meaningfully improve predictions of serious academic failures across all community college subgroups. The measures are most helpful for White students, which raises questions about equity and unintended consequences. Finally, in paper #3, we examine if dual enrollment through Early College opportunities can specifically help English Learners, a traditionally low performing group, access and persist in college.

This session examines the utility of a number of systems and supports (identification measures, high school-to-college programs, and community college services) in helping disadvantaged student populations. The collective findings from these studies serve to highlight not only critical junctures in the transition to and in higher education, but also creative ways to think about targeting services.