Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The Enhanced Academic Student Experience initiative (EASE) is a year-long learning communities program for incoming Biological Sciences (BioSci) majors at a large Hispanic-serving institution in California. EASE groups hundreds of incoming BioSci majors into cohorts of 30, co-enrolls these student groups in all first-year courses, and provides participants with study skills support, increased academic counseling, and weekly meetings with a mentor.

This study uses administrative data, program data, and survey data for all entering BioSci students during Fall 2016 (cohort 1, N=1081), Fall 2017 (cohort 2, N=1110), and Fall 2018 (cohort 3, N = 883) to estimate treatment effects of the EASE program. Selection into the program is determined by a strict cutoff on SAT-math scores, which provides an opportunity to assess the impact of EASE with a regression discontinuity design (RD). Specifically, I examine impacts of the EASE program on: i) students experience in college and short-run academic outcomes and ii) longer-term outcomes such as two-year cumulative GPA and two-year retention. I also estimate the heterogeneous impact of the EASE program by student demographic characteristics. For the heterogeneity analysis I use a differences-in-differences strategy. This analysis will examine the impact of the EASE program by looking at changes in both the control group (students with greater than 600 on SAT-math) and treatment group (students with less than 600 on SAT-math) over time, that is, during years when EASE was not offered (before the 2015 academic year) and during years when EASE was offered (academic years 2016 and 2017) for each subgroup population.

Preliminary results suggest that the EASE program improves the student experience in college and student academic outcomes. Specifically:

• The program improves students' social-psychological measures of the student experience. Students in EASE report values that are 0.39 and 0.37 standard deviation units higher than otherwise similar students not in the EASE program for the measure of sense of belonging and academic integration, respectively.
• The program has a positive effect on students short-run academic outcomes. Students in EASE earn course grades in introductory Biology that is 30 units higher on a 0 to 4 point scale (equivalent to moving a student from a B- to a B, for example) as compared to students not in the program. The point estimate for cumulative year 1 GPA is 0.20 units higher for students in the EASE program, as compared to those not in the program.
• The program also has a positive effect on students long-run academic outcomes. The impact of EASE on cumulative GPA remains at the end of year 2 and the magnitude of the effect is fairly similar. There is no impact on year 2 retention.

The full set of results using cohorts 1-3 data including heterogeneity analysis and specific policy implications will be discussed during the APPAM presentation.