Memo issued to research field.
NSC responded here: https://nscresearchcenter.org/workingwithourdata/notesfromthefield-3/
Washington State’s independent analysis: https://erdc.wa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/NSC-Paper.pdf
Wisconsin is at a crossroads. Even before the recent economic crisis, the state was lagging
behind our peers in Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa in population growth, per capita income,
and the share of the population with more than a high school education. Without a significant
investment in education, Wisconsin will continue to fall further behind not only our peers in the
Midwest, but the nation as a whole.
Given scarce resources for evaluation, we recommend
that education researchers more frequently conduct
comprehensive randomized trials that generate evidence
on how, why, and under what conditions interventions
succeed or fail in producing effects. Recent experience
evaluating a randomized need-based financial
aid intervention highlights some of our arguments and
guides our outline of the circumstances under which
the examination of mechanisms and heterogeneous impacts
is particularly important. Comprehensive experiments
can enhance research productivity by increasing
the number of theories both tested and generated and
can advance policy and practice by exploring the conditions
under which interventions will bemost successful
in scale up. Paradoxically,while the emphasis on average
treatment effects is typically associated with efficiencyminded
economists, we argue that the approach is often
inefficient from the standpoints of science and policy.
Income inequality in educational attainment is a long-standing concern,
and disparities in college completion have grown over time.
Need-based financial aid is commonly used to promote equality in
college outcomes, but its effectiveness has not been established, and
some are calling it into question. A randomized experiment is used to
estimate the impact of a private need-based grant program on college
persistence and degree completion among students from low-income
families attending 13 public universities across Wisconsin. Results indicate
that offering students additional grant aid increases the odds of
bachelor’s degree attainment over four years, helping to diminish income
inequality in higher education.