The College Board sought to reduce barriers in the college application process by minimizing information aggregation costs, encouraging a broad application portfolio, and providing an impetus to start the search process. Some students were offered additional encouragements, such as text message reminders or college application fee waivers. In a…

Postsecondary education is widely seen as a necessity in the modern economy, yet among low and middle-income families, college enrollment rates are dismayingly low -- and graduation rates are even lower. College Promise programs, which cover local students' college tuition and fees, are one strategy states and municipalities use to help. But…

We present evidence from an ongoing field experiment in college coaching/mentoring. The experiment is designed to ask whether mentoring plus cash incentives provided to high school students late in their senior year have meaningful impacts on college going and persistence. For women, we find large impacts on the decision to enroll in college and…

For the 2013 study, "Transfer Incentives for High-Performing Teachers: Final Results from a Multisite Randomized Experiment," researchers examined the impact of the Talent Transfer Initiative (TTI) on students' reading and mathematics achievement in 10 school districts. The TTI enabled principals of low-performing schools to provide…

In the 2007-2008 school year, the New York City Department of Education and the United Federation of Teachers jointly implemented the Schoolwide Performance Bonus Program in a random sample of the city's high-needs public schools. The program lasted for three school years, and its broad objective was to improve student performance through…

One way to improve struggling schools' access to effective teachers is to use selective transfer incentives. Such incentives offer bonuses for the highest-performing teachers to move into schools serving the most disadvantaged students. In this report, we provide evidence from a randomized experiment that tested whether such a policy intervention…

The passage of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which extended need-based financial assistance to the general population for the first time, has improved college access for American students, but more work remains to be done to improve college success. According to government statistics, in 2006, about one in six students had earned a degree or…

Teacher compensation schemes are often criticized for lacking a performance-based component. Proponents of merit pay argue that linking teacher salaries to student achievement will incentivize teachers to focus on raising student achievement and stimulate innovation across the school system as a whole. In this paper, we utilize a policy experiment…

From July 1995 through September 2001, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) and the Ford Foundation (Ford) operated a demonstration of the Quantum Opportunity Program (QOP). QOP offered intensive and comprehensive services to help at-risk youth graduate from high school and enroll in postsecondary education or training. QOP was mainly an…