Can a College Readiness Intervention Impact Longer-Term College Success? Evidence from Florida’s Statewide Initiative

ABSTRACT

In 2011, under the Florida College and Career Readiness Initiative (FCCRI), Florida made college placement testing mandatory for 11th-grade students who had scored in the midrange of its standardized 10th-grade assessment. Those with placement test scores below college-ready were assigned in 12th grade to college readiness and success (CRS courses). We use regression discontinuity analysis at assessment cutoffs and data on all public school students in Florida to examine whether the FCCRI had impacts on longer-term outcomes of postsecondary persistence, transfer, and degree completion two and three years after seamless college enrollment. We find that the statewide policy had no substantive impacts on longer-term college success, which may be attributed to underlying issues with the theory of action and challenges to implementation.

KEYWORDS:

• College readiness
• college transition courses
• developmental education
• regression discontinuity
• state policy

Acknowledgement

This study was made possible by the collaboration and hard work of many individuals beyond the authors. We would like to thank other current and former members of the research team, including Louis Jacobson, James Rosenbaum, Robert LaLonde, Julie Harris, John Hughes, Thomas Geraghty, Juliana Pearson, Michael Flory, Steve Lee, and Sarah Waters. We would also like to thank the members of our Technical Working Group for comments on this report and/or previous related reports: David Figlio, Stephen Raudenbush, and Jeffrey Smith.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ For students in our sample near the college readiness cutoff in math, approximately 26% had high school course-taking trajectories on the “slow” track, 50% on the “standard” track, and 23% on the “fast” track. Near the college readiness cutoff in reading, 31% were on a “standard” track, 28% were on a “mixed” track, 27% were on an “honors or AP” track, and 4% were on an “other” track (predominately ESOL).

² Students who transferred out-of-state were not counted as persisting.

³ We excluded students enrolled in both levels during the initial year, as this could reflect coenrollment. We also ignored transfers among two-year or four-year colleges. Our measure is therefore a lower bound for the number of actual transfers.

⁴ The equation is modified for students who are assigned to treatment if they are below the cutoff either by changing ${\tilde{R}}_i\ge 0$ to ${\tilde{R}}_i\le 0$ or by changing ${\tilde{R}}_i=R_i-c$ to ${\tilde{R}}_i=c-R_i$ (functionally equivalent). This applies to the Grade 11 PERT cutoff, for which being below a cutoff meant assignment to the CRS courses.

⁵ We used students’ initial Grade 11 PERT scores for the small percentage of students with multiple scores; although schools were more likely to use students’ highest scores to determine assignment to CRS courses, it is not possible to manipulate initial scores by selective retesting.

⁶ Domains are based on the WWC review protocol for studies of interventions to support postsecondary success https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/Docs/ReferenceResources/wwc_sps_protocol_v3.0.pdf.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305E120010 to the CNA Corporation. The report represents the best opinion of CNA at the time of issue and does not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.