A Systematic Review of Evidence on the Effectiveness of Targeted College Access Programs Offering No-Cost or Subsidized College Enrollment

Wendy Castillo, Gregory J. Collins, and Rebecca A. Maynard

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This chapter reports on a systematic review of evidence on the effectiveness of college access programs that offer no-cost or subsidized enrollment to targeted individuals or groups. The primary question relates to the estimated impact on college enrollment of participants for those programs that have been rigorously evaluated. The authors conducted a search of major electronic databases, supplemented by hand searches for grey literature, which produced eight independent impact estimates for six different college access programs meeting prespecified inclusion criteria. The average impact estimated for the six programs is a 10 percentage point increase (p =.0000) in the college enrollment rate for program participants. The estimated impacts for individual programs range from a 40 percentage point increase (p =.0000) for Early College High School to a 2 percentage point decrease (p =.0000) for the Advanced Placement Incentive Program.