| Dong Wook Jeong
Columbia University
The effects of the advanced placement program on college-level outcomes
FIINAL REPORT
Two thirds of America's public high schools provide AP courses with an enrollment of 1.8 million students during the 2002-2003 academic year. Despite the importance of the AP program in secondary education, there is not much literature rigorously examining its effectiveness. The existing literature, in particular, has not dealt with issues of sample selection when evaluating AP programs. AP students may show better outcomes because they constitute a selected sample, not necessarily because AP programs provide them with an advantage over non-participants. It has also failed to examine statistically whether the introduction of AP programs may have affected academic performance of students who do not participate in these programs.
Using the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988-2000, this study implements the two-stage selection correction method to address explicitly student and school selection effects involved in AP program participation. The study exploits an exogenous variation in state-sponsored AP incentive policies to identify the average causal effects of the AP program on college-level outcomes. The results suggest that there are strong positive impacts of the AP program on the college-level outcomes of AP students, whether in the short-run or in the long-run. AP course participation would increase from 25 to 38 per cent the probability of attaining a bachelor's degree and reduce time to obtain the degree by 0.30 to 0.36 year. In addition, it increases college GPAs for the 1st year, the 2nd year, and all other years by 0.16-0.44 points, 0.15-0.44 points, and 0.18-0.41 points, respectively. The paper also finds little evidence of negative spill-over effects of the presence of an AP program on non-participants in the school. Lastly, the study finds substantial heterogeneity in the effectiveness of the AP program on the basis of student characteristics. Economically disadvantaged and minority students appear to obtain more benefits from AP programs than their counterparts. These findings suggest that AP programs are successfully providing students with improved college-level outcomes, especially minority students, narrowing the gaps in educational attainment present in the United States.
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