Why study performance based scholarships?
The purpose of this project is to understand whether performance based scholarships can improve retention and persistence among low-income community college students. The demonstration is a replication of MDRC’s Opening Doors study in Louisiana that offered a performance based scholarship to low-income parents at two community colleges. That study showed large, statistically significant impacts on persistence and credit accumulation. This demonstration project is intended to replicate the Louisiana study using different target populations, in different geographic areas, across different institutions, and with different scholarship amounts in order to understand the generalizability of the Louisiana findings. Why random assignment? A random assignment evaluation is considered the gold standard of program evaluation and is the recommended research method by the US Department of Education. Since there will be no differences between members of the scholarship group and regular services gro
