Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Using regression discontinuity approach and data on 11 cohorts from all four-year public institutions in Missouri, I test whether rural students are less likely than their non-rural peers to persist and to graduate as a result of having been placed on academic probation in the first semester. I find that rural students who get a first term GPA just below the probation cutoff are about six percentage points (8%) less likely to return for their sophomore year than their rural counterparts who get a GPA just above the probation cutoff. This negative effect is larger for students who attend rural-minority institutions (defined as having a share of rural students that is less than 50% of the total student population) as well as those who come from more remote areas than their peers who attend rural-majority institutions and those who come from less remote (e.g. rural fringe and small towns), respectively. In contrast, nonrural students do not drop out as a result of being placed on academic probation. Conditional on re-enrollment, academic probation causes all students to improve their grade GPA in the second term but nonrural students gain almost twice as much as their rural peers. Finally, I find no discernible effect on the likelihood of graduation of all students.