The impacts of preferential college admissions for the disadvantaged: experimental evidence

Specifically, this report evaluates the impacts of the PACE programme on higher-education admissions and on higher-education enrolment of the disadvantaged students targeted by the programme, up to four years after the end of secondary education. [...] In this report, we exploit the randomised expansion of the programme, which occurred in 2016, to evaluate the impacts of PACE on the admission, enrolment and retention in higher education of disadvantaged students. [...] Given that the empirically relevant margin of policy response appears to be the intensive margin of where to enrol, we next analyse the impact of PACE on the characteristics of the degree programme in which students enrol. [...] Table 7 shows the effect of PACE on the logarithm of the average earnings of past graduates from the degree programme in which students enrol.7 We found a positive effect of around 3% (albeit this effect is not significant in the specification that adds all controls, in column 3). [...] Because PACE guarantees an admission to students who graduate in the top 15% of their school in terms of the GPA, we next analyse impacts by considering whether students were, at baseline, in the top 15% or in the remaining 85% of the GPA distribution in their school.9 The results in Table 10 show that PACE had a positive and statistically significant effect on enrolment in selective universities.