A study by Matthew M. Chingos and Paul E. Peterson on the long-term impact of school vouchers on college enrollment and graduation won the 2016 Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP) Prize awarded for Best Academic Paper on School Choice and Reform.
The study found that minority students who received a school voucher to attend private elementary schools in 1997 were, as of 2013, 10 percent more likely to enroll in college and 35 percent more likely than their peers in public school to obtain a bachelor’s degree.
Most research on the impact of school vouchers looks at short-term outcomes like test scores. This study was unique in that it was able to track longer-term outcomes in the context of a randomized experiment.
The study, “Experimentally estimated impacts of school vouchers on college enrollment and degree attainment,” was published in the Journal of Public Economics in 2015. The authors wrote about the study for the Education Next blog here.