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Finishing College: The Role of State Policy in Degree Attainment

Half of college students drop out before completing a degree. While there is strong evidence that financial aid can increase college attendance, there is little evidence that it increases degree completion or even years of completed schooling. This is an important evidentiary gap, since it is completed schooling that is rewarded by the labor market. I exploit the introduction of two large state financial aid programs to estimate the impact of aid on completed schooling. I find that the aid programs increase the share of the population that completes a college degree by three percentage points. The effects are strongest among women, with white, non-Hispanic women increasing degree receipt by 3.8 percentage points and the share of other women attempting or completing any years of college increasing by six and eight percentage points, respectively. While my estimation strategy cannot separately identify the effect of aid on entry and persistence, I establish fairly tight bounds on the persistence effect, concluding that the aid programs increase the college persistence rate by 5 to 11 percent.