Since the early Nineties, over a dozen states have established broad-based merit aid programs. The typical program waives tuition and fees at public colleges and universities in one’s home state. Unlike traditional, elite merit programs such as the National Merit Scholarship, the new merit aid requires relatively modest academic credentials and annually funds hundreds of thousands of students. This paper examines how merit aid programs in seven states have affected an array of schooling decisions, paying particular attention to how the effects have varied by race and ethnicity. I find that the new programs typically increase the attendance probability of college-age youth by five to seven percentage points. The merit programs also shift students toward four-year schools and away from two-year schools. Surprisingly, the Georgia HOPE Scholarship, which widened racial gaps in college attendance (Dynarski, 2000) is found to be atypical in its distributional impact. The other states’ merit aid programs have actually closed racial and ethnic gaps in attendance. I attribute the Georgia program’s unique distributional effect to its relatively stringent academic requirements and a recently-eliminated provision that channeled the most generous scholarships to higher-income students.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government in its series Working Paper Series with number
rwp04-009.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: ().
Related research
Keywords:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)