New Profit: College Advising Corps

College Advising Corps (CAC) strives to increase the number of low-income, first-generation-college, and underrepresented students entering and completing higher education. The program matches recent college graduates to high schools to serve as near peer advisers. Starting in 2011-12, CAC collaborated with the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to conduct a randomized controlled trial among Texas high schools.

Study Goals:

The evaluation sought to identify the causal impact of CAC’s program on college enrollment. There was also a second, complementary part of the evaluation to determine how well the program was implemented.

Research Questions:

The evaluation included impact and implementation questions. The research questions were:

• Impact Questions:
  • What is the program’s impact on college enrollment?
  • What is the program’s impact on the pathways to college?
  • What is the program’s impact on school culture?
  • Does the current program engage parents in meaningful and productive ways?
  • What impact has participation in the program had on the advisers’ attitudes and life choices?
• Implementation Questions:
  • How was the program organized?
  • Did the treatment group receive services as planned? What kinds of services did the comparison group receive?
  • Did the types of students actually receiving services have the expected characteristics? Were they eligible to participate?
  • What were the most important ways in which the model as implemented differed from the model as planned?
  • How much variation in implementation fidelity was there across sites? On what aspects of implementation was the greatest variation?
  • What was the cost of the program? Did the cost vary across sites or different types of participants?

Findings:

The evaluation found the following:

• CAC had a 2 percent effect on college enrollment among all students in its first year, concentrated among Hispanic and low-income students, when other factors were not accounted for in the model.
• CAC increased two-year college enrollment by 2.4 percent among all students in its first year, with larger effects for Hispanic students of 3.4 percent.
• There was no statistically significant impact of the program on college enrollment.
• In the first year, there were no significant differences in four-year college enrollment rates.

For more information, download the full report and report brief.