How Much Does Merit Aid Actually Matter? Revisiting Merit Aid and College Enrollment When Some Students “Come Anyway”

Matthew Birch () and Robert Rosenman
Additional contact information
Matthew Birch: Texas Lutheran University

Research in Higher Education, 2019, vol. 60, issue 6, No 2, 760-802

Abstract: Abstract Merit aid is an increasingly important component of college scholarships, but policymakers are concerned that merit aid is often given to students who would enroll anyway. As a baseline we use a regression discontinuity (RD) framework to test an institution-level merit aid program at a public research university and find that the merit aid program successfully increases the likelihood of enrollment. We then add to the RD a structure that accounts for the probability that specific students would enroll (or not enroll) with certainty. This richer model, which allows us to identify students who are less certain about enrolling, indicates the merit aid is much more effective in convincing such students to enroll.

Keywords: Merit aid; Regression discontinuity; Misclassification; Binary choice model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 I22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11162-018-9532-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:reihed:v:60:y:2019:i:6:d:10.1007_s11162-018-9532-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/11162

DOI: 10.1007/s11162-018-9532-0

Access Statistics for this article

Research in Higher Education is currently edited by Robert K. Toutkoushian

More articles in Research in Higher Education from Springer, Association for Institutional Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().