By evaluating the Academic Acceleration Program (AAP), this paper examines whether switching the default of advanced coursework enrollment encourages high school students to take dual credit courses. I estimate the impact of qualifying for AAP using a regression discontinuity design to evaluate subsequent education outcomes. I find that students just qualifying for AAP increase their likelihood of taking a relevant dual credit course by 8 percentage points, with stronger results for boys. However, qualification for AAP does not significantly alter education outcomes. As policymakers continue these programs, it’s important to understand whether simply expanding access is sufficient in improving outcomes.

Immigration consistently ranks as one of the most important political issues in the United States. Partly because of its political importance, there exists a vast economic literature examining the impacts of changes in immigration on a wide variety of outcomes. Much less work examines the forces that drive sentiment towards immigrants, or the policies adopted surrounding the issue. In this paper, we examine whether negative local labor market shocks influence the adoption of anti-immigration policy by examining changes in the likelihood of any county within a commuting zone forming a partnership with United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) following changes in the unemployment rate as a result of the Great Recession.

Despite the growth of private-school voucher programs, our understanding of their effectiveness relies on results from small-scale randomized control trials. We show that those results may not translate to programs at scale by examining changes in school quality following the implementation of the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program. We find that public schools facing high exposure to the policy increased quality while participating private schools decreased quality. Initially poor performing public schools drive our results, suggesting that the public school quality gap shrunk because of the program. Policymakers should consider these indirect effects to understand vouchers’ total impact on educational outcomes.

As of 2019, about 250 four-year colleges and universities had adopted a test-optional application procedure that allowed students to apply for admission without submitting an SAT or ACT score. Many schools adopted this procedure to encourage greater racial and socioeconomic diversity among admitted students. Unfortunately, we know little about the impact of test-optional policies. In this paper, I use a difference-in-differences design to examine the impact of this reform on schools that adopted the policies between 2006 and 2014. Compared to schools that did not switch, test-optional schools witnessed around a 15 percent increase in the number of Black, Native American/Alaskan Native, and Hispanic enrollments and around a 7 percent increase in the number of Pell Grant students. I also show that test-optional policies affect financial aid disbursements. After switching, schools experienced an increase in the number of students receiving institutional grant aid, but decreases in the average aid granted. Schools offset the decrease in grant aid by increasing the availability of institutional loans. Institutions interested in adopting these policies should consider these possible unintended consequences.