Percent Plans, Automatic Admissions, and College Enrollment Outcomes

Percent Plans, Automatic Admissions, and College Enrollment Outcomes Lindsay Daugherty RAND Corporation [email protected] Francisco (Paco) Martorell RAND Corporation [email protected] Isaac McFarlin Jr. University of Michigan [email protected] September 2012 Abstract In 1997, the Texas Legislature passed House Bill 588 – also known as the Texas Top Ten Percent Law – guaranteeing automatic admission to all state-funded universities for Texas students in the top ten percent of their high school class. Automatic admissions policies remain controversial, and the effects of these policies on college enrollment and choice remain unclear. Using regression discontinuity methods and data on 6 cohorts of graduates from a large urban school district, we examine the effect of eligibility for automatic admission on college enrollment and persistence. We find that the Top Ten Percent Law does have a substantial impact on enrollment at Texas flagship universities and increases the total number of semesters enrolled at a flagship university four years after high school graduation. This increase in flagship enrollment appears to displace enrollment in private or out-of-state universities, and we find no effect on college enrollment overall or on the quality of college attended. We find evidence of effects on flagship enrollment for both white and minority students. However, these effects are concentrated in schools that send large (relative to the district) fractions of graduates to college, suggesting that automatic admissions may have little effect on the outcomes of students in the most disadvantaged schools. This is a preliminary draft. Please do not cite or distribute without permission of the authors. 1 1. Introduction Recent research (Hoekstra, 2009; Andrews et al., 2012) suggests that there may be large economic returns to attending highly-selective universities. As a consequence, the process by which students are admitted to these institutions has garnered considerable attention from policymakers, researchers and members of the public. Concerns about fairness and equity have been particularly salient. Universities have sought to increase the diversity of their student body through “affirmative action” policies that grant preferences in admissions decisions to members of racial and ethnic minorities that have traditionally been under-represented at selective universities. However, the legality of these policies has been challenged, and a 1996 decision by the U.S. 5th Circuit Court in Hopwood v. Texas banned the use of race in college admissions decisions.1 In response to this decision, the state of Texas passed the “Top Ten Percent Plan” in 1997 that guaranteed admission to any public university to students in the top decile of their high school class. The goal of this law was to maintain racial, economic and geographic diversity at the state’s flagship universities, since it ensures that the same proportion of students are eligible for admission to any public university irrespective of how disadvantaged the students served by a particular school happen to be. Two other states (California and Florida) soon followed suit and adopted similar policies.2 Despite being explicitly race-neutral, “percent plans” remain very controversial. Critics contend that the law is unfair to students at more competitive high schools who may be denied admission in favor of students with worse academic credentials (such as college entrance exam scores) but who are admitted by virtue of being in the top ten percent (TTP) at a less competitive high school. University administrators also contend that too many students are admitted under the automatic admission policy, thereby forcing them to turn down better-qualified applicants.3 To address these concerns, the Texas law was changed so that, 1 The 2003 Supreme Court ruling in Grutter v Bollinger upheld a policy of race-based application considerations at the University of Michigan, and after that decision the University of Texas reinstated some racial preferences in admission for students outside of the top ten percent. The Supreme Court is currently scheduled to reconsider the legality of racial preferences in college admissions in the case of Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. 2 Florida grants automatic admission to students in the top 20 percent of their high school class to the University of Florida system, and automatic admission to the University of California system is available to students in the top 4 percent of their class (Horn and Flores, 2003) 3 Another possible criticism of the TTP Law is that encourages a form of gaming whereby students seek out less competitive high schools in order to get into the TTP (Cullen, Long and Reback, 2011). 2 beginning with the fall 2011 entering class, the University of Texas-Austin could cap the share of enrollees admitted under the automatic admissions rule to 75 percent. Of course, the relevance of the claims made both in favor and against percent plans depends on whether and for whom eligibility for automatic admission actually affects college enrollment and choice. In this paper, we examine this question by estimating the causal effect of being eligible for automatic admission on the college enrollment and college choice outcomes of several cohorts of high school students from a large urban school district in Texas. To carry out this analysis, we created a database that links detailed high school records from district administrative data to college enrollment information from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) database. To account for the fact that students in the top class rank decile would have better college outcomes even without the automatic admission policy, we use a regression discontinuity design that compares the outcomes of students on either side of the top ten percent class rank cutoff. Our approach has several important strengths. First, our data are drawn from students in a large urban school district that has traditionally sent few students to the state’s leading universities and to college in general. This study sheds light on whether automatic college admission affects college outcomes for a potentially under-served population. Second, we use administrative data on college enrollment from the National Student Clearinghouse, which allows us to consider a wider set of outcomes than just flagship enrollment and does not suffer from misreporting error present in survey data. In particular, we can assess whether flagship enrollment induced by being in the TTP of one’s class displaces enrollment at other institutions. This is also the first study on the TTP Law that we are aware of that examines longer-run college persistence measures. Third, we are able to compute class rank at various points throughout high school, including the end of 11th grade, which is the key point for determining membership in the top ten percent for the purposes of applying to the state’s flagship universities. In contrast, the only other study using this type of approach (Niu and Tienda, 2010) uses class rank measured at the end of 12th grade, which is after students would have applied to college. Our results suggest this difference may be important. Our preliminary findings suggest that the TTP Law does have a substantial impact on enrollment at Texas flagship universities for students in a large urban district. Our results suggest that eligibility for automatic admissions leads to substitution away from private or out-of-state 3 colleges rather than lower-ranked public institutions. On net, we do not find evidence of an effect on the likelihood of enrolling in college or on enrollment at a four-year college. We also find some evidence indicative of important heterogeneity. The estimated effects on flagship attendance are twice as large for white students as they are for minority students, and there are no effects for low-income students. We also find no evidence of an effect of automatic admission in high schools that traditionally send relatively few students to four-year colleges. In ongoing work, we are examining the effect of automatic admission on other measures of college quality students attend, as well as on measures of college persistence and attainment. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews existing research on the TTP Law and provides some background on how the law works. Section 3 presents the conceptual framework for our study, and Section 4 discusses the data on high school achievement and college enrollment and provides descriptive statistics for students by TTP status. Section 5 describes our regression discontinuity strategy. Results are presented in Section 6. Section 7 concludes. 2. Background and Existing Research The economic and societal benefits of college education are well-known (Kane and Rouse, 1995; Currie and Moretti, 2003). These benefits tend to be especially large at the most selective universities, as demonstrated by a recent study which showed that earnings are up to 20 percent higher as a consequence of attending the “flagship” university (Hoekstra, 2009). Who gains access to college, and in particular, to the most elite universities, is thus a central question for higher education policymakers in Texas and throughout the nation. Typically, universities select students on the basis of academic achievement as measured by standardized test scores and high school grades. Given that more advantaged students tend to have stronger academic credentials (Kane, 1998), a consequence of this system is that other students

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