College Summer School: Educational Benefits and Enrollment Preferences

Abstract

We experimentally examine whether a policy targeting college summer school enrollment can accelerate degree progress and completion. We randomly assign summer scholarships to community college students and find a large impact on degree acceleration, increasing graduation within one year of the intervention by 32% and transfers to four-year colleges by 58%. We elicit preferences for the scholarships and find substantial treatment effects on enrollment, graduation,
and transfer among students with a preference against summer school. These results suggest that many more students could benefit from summer school than the minority who currently enroll.

Keywords: summer school, free tuition, field experiment, community college

JEL Classification: I23, C93