Community College Promise Programs and Local Impact: Aggregate Effects of College Attainment in Three Promise Communities

Roman Ruiz, Elaine W. Leigh, Ashley Napier, and Manuel S. González Canché

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Despite the proliferation of college promise programs, which are geographically targeted financial aid awards, relatively little rigorous evaluation research exists documenting their educational impacts. While these programs vary in design elements, local contexts, and intended outcomes, there is a particular program type that has remained practically unstudied: the program that restricts use of the award to a single community college. This study assesses the effect of three single community college promise programs using a difference-in-differences framework. Using data from the American Community Survey, the analyses reveal no evidence of treatment effects on aggregate college attainment rates at the census tract level for residents within the county of the community college. The findings have implications for program design, for programs’ selection of populations to target for intervention, and for how researchers can leverage readily accessible data to understand program impacts.