Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Rising income inequality, particularly between adults with and without a college degree, has reinvigorated a national dialogue about the role of postsecondary institutions as a driver of social mobility. Analyzing “Promise” programs – place-based scholarship programs that aim to increase college-going – is one window into understanding the potential implications of a tuition-free college system. There is little consistent format to these programs (Perna, Leigh, & Carroll, 2017), suggesting that researchers may want to consider multiple empirical evaluations, as well as theory, to synthesize and predict the potential positive and negative impacts of this policy lever (Bartik, Hershbein, & Lachowska, 2017; Carruthers, Fox, & Jepsen, 2018; Page, Iriti, Lowry, & Anthony, 2017).

This paper examines the Oregon Promise, which promotes in-state community college attendance. I link College Board data on PSAT- and SAT-takers to National Student Clearinghouse data on postsecondary enrollments. I present a difference-in-difference analysis that compares Oregon to six control states, which all have strong coverage of 10^th grade public school students. These states all subsidize PSAT participation during the academic school day, minimizing the reliance on a sample of self-selected PSAT takers that might not generalize to the general state’s population. The use of 10^th grade PSAT takers also eliminates potential endogeneity issues in my sample, such as shifts in SAT participation or effort, as PSAT exams provide a measure of students’ academic preparation that occurred significantly prior to the point that the Oregon Promise was under discussion.

I find that the implementation of the Oregon Promise increased enrollment at in-state, public two-year colleges between four and five percentage points. Estimates suggest that increased community college enrollment in the first year of the program came predominately as students shifted out of four-year colleges, whereas by the second year the program induced gains in overall postsecondary attendance. Heterogeneous impacts, using an index based on propensity to attend a four-year college, show the largest gains in community college enrollment come from students that can be roughly considered in the “middle”, with smaller impacts from students with very low and very high propensity to attend a four-year college (and conversely, high and low propensity to attend no college at all).

This paper contributes to our understanding of postsecondary financing, with a particular focus on the role of Promise programs. In the short-run, the Oregon Promise may have had some impact on shifting students to institutions that are less structured and provide fewer resources per student, which in other contexts has had negative impacts on degree completion (Cohodes & Goodman, 2014; Goodman, Hurwitz, & Smith, 2017; Scott-Clayton, 2015). Yet positive impacts on postsecondary attendance appear stronger in the second year of the program, and give hope that the program will lead to meaningful gains in degree completion. One implication is that the saliency of the program – the message of college as “free” and how well information is received among the target population – likely impacts postsecondary attendance as much as the monetary amount involved.