College Access When Preparedness Matters: Evidence from Large Advantages in College Admissions

Organised by

• Department of Economics

Exploiting a randomised control trial and a dynamic structural model, we provide evidence on the impact of preferential college admission in Chile on education outcomes. The college admission policy (PACE) targeted disadvantaged students scoring 1.5 standard deviations below regular college entrants on high school tests. We constructed a 9-year-long longitudinal dataset on 9,006 students linking detailed administrative records to survey data. We show that PACE increased first-year college enrollment by 3.1 percentage points and the effect shrank to 1.1 in the fifth year. The programme decreased the pre-college effort of students, likely due to belief biases about their absolute and relative ability. Using simulations from a dynamic structural model, we show that eliminating the pre-college belief biases would improve the college preparedness of college entrants. Our results demonstrate that expanding admission advantages to very disadvantaged populations can improve their college attainment, but college preparedness matters and it responds to investments and incentives shortly before college.