Last month the Urban Institute added to the rapidly accumulating body of conflicting evidence about the impacts of private school choice on student achievement. While early studies showed positive effects on test scores, more recent evidence from Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio showed private school choice programs having neutral to negative effects. This report differs from most of its predecessors by measuring long-term outcomes, namely college enrollment and attainment. Urban’s investigation of the Florida Tax Credit (FTC) scholarship program is the first study to look at these outcomes at the state level, and the results are encouraging.
While not a traditional voucher system, the FTC program allows Florida taxpayers to receive a 100 percent tax credit for donations to scholarship funding organizations, which provide tuition assistance for low-income students to attend private schools. Participants in the program must have family incomes of up to 260 percent of the US poverty threshold and receive scholarships worth up to $6000. Started during the 2002–03 school year, FTC is now the largest private school choice program in the country, with 100,000 current participants.
Analysts compare FTC participants to non-FTC students, controlling for test scores, age, gender, race or ethnicity, native/foreign-born status, and language spoken at home. Only students who were in grades three through ten the year before entering the program are included in the study so standardized test data was available for comparison. In order to see long-term effects, students are only included in the study if they were out of high school for at least two years in the final year of the study.
Analysts find that participants in the Florida Tax Credit scholarship program saw improved college enrollment compared to students who stayed in public schools. Overall, FTC students were 6 percentage points more likely to enroll in college at any level than non-FTC students. Notably, the longer participants were enrolled in private school, the larger the benefits; student participating in FTC for four or more years were 18 percentage points more likely to attend college than non-participants.
These impressive gains were almost entirely a result of increases in community college enrollment. Enrollments in four-year colleges were mostly unaffected for FTC participants. Degree attainment, both associate’s and bachelor’s, were also similar for FTC and non-FTC students. The only exception was for FTC students who entered private school in elementary or middle school and participated for four or more years. This group saw a 1.5 percentage point gain in four-year college enrollment and a 2 percentage point gain in associate degree attainment, underscoring the benefits of early and continued participation in Florida’s program.
A major limitation of the study is that it only measures in-state public college enrollment and graduation. Therefore, students who attended out-of-state and/or private colleges are not accounted for in the data. However, Urban Institute analysts state that this limitation means that their study likely understates the true impact of the program, since nationwide private school students are more likely than public school students to attend such schools.
Florida’s program serves a disproportionate number of low performing, poor and minority students who come from the worst performing schools in the state. More work needs to be done to ensure the state’s neediest students are not only enrolling in college but earning a degree, yet these results are promising. As more states, including Illinois, implement similar policies, Florida’s example stands out as a potential model to emulate.
SOURCE: Matthew M. Chingos and Daniel Kuehn, “The Effects of Statewide Private School Choice on College Enrollment and Graduation: Evidence from the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program,” Urban Institute (September 2017).
