Improving College Enrollment of At-Risk Students at the School Level

Many federal, state, and local education policy priorities are aimed at preparing high school students, especially those at risk, to be college- and career-ready when they graduate from high school. A number of programs across different institutional entities have been initiated to achieve these goals, encompassing individual partnerships with schools. Many of these programs include a variety of interventions, ranging from college and course counseling to college visits. Although there have been some evaluations of the larger federal programs, and some state and district programs, few have examined national observational data on the impact of these programmatic efforts on college enrollments. This study uses the HSLS:09 database to investigate the impact of specific treatments in at-risk schools on college enrollments. Results show that several of these programmatic initiatives have a positive effect on college enrollment; however the effects are small compared to some of those reported by other national studies.