Abstract: Credentials are tied to educational standards (Costrell, 1994; Betts 1998). In this paper, I use administrative data from Florida to estimate the effects of college educational standards on college outcomes. Using regression discontinuity analysis, I estimate the effects of failing the College Level Academic Skills Test (CLAST) on the first attempt on the Number of Semesters Enrolled after the First CLAST Attempt and the Probability of Receiving an Associates in Arts (AA) Degree for college students who narrowly pass and narrowly fail the CLAST. I find small effect on the Probability of receiving an AA degree (small "Can't Pass" effect) and no effect on the Number of Semesters Enrolled after the First CLAST attempt (no "Discouragement" effect). The multiple CLAST retesting opportunities and the other ways of meeting the CLAST requirements possibly generated these small effects. This suggests that the impacts of college accountability could greatly depend on the details of the particular accountability system used.
Abstract: Many of the policies that fall under the school accountability umbrella are designed to incentivize students. Prominent among these are high school exit exams, standardized tests that, in some states, students must pass to earn a high school diploma. Proponents of these tests argue that by incentivizing students, they induce them to work harder and, therefore, improve their high school performance and, perhaps, longer-run outcomes; some of these proponents argue that these exams would be even more helpful if they were set at a higher standard. Critics worry that these exams prevent some students from graduating and cause others to dropout; they contend that these effects are worse if standards are higher. In this paper we investigate the impacts of an increase in the exit exam standard in Florida. Using difference-in-difference methods, we show that this had few of the negative effects claimed by critics. We cannot detect any positive effects of the higher standard, although such effects may be too small to be picked up with our data.
Abstract: The rapidly rising cost of college education received attention and concern from consumers and policy makers. Much attention has focused on whether the returns to college education have kept pace with the increasing college cost. Despite the increasing returns to college education, the growth in the number of college students remains small. This is true especially among community college students who are more sensitive to changes in college costs than to the changes in college premium (Kane and Rouse, 1999). In this paper, I explore the use of the fraction of the cost of attending a nearby community college as an exogenous source of variation in community college education. Using a rich administrative data from Florida, I find that a higher fraction of cost of attending a nearby community college has a negative but small effects on community college education. Using the fraction of cost as an instrumental variable for community college education, the implied IV estimates of the returns to community college education are large but do not reject estimates from the OLS models. These instrumental variables estimates provide suggestive evidence of large returns to community college education among students whose college decisions are affected by the fraction of the cost of attending a nearby community college.