2015 College Possible: Closing the Achievement Gap for Low-Income Students i3 National Development Study

The College Possible program provides college focused sessions for high school students with college potential in group and one-on-one settings. Coaches conducted small group sessions for two hours twice a week over the course of participants' junior and senior years of high school. In these sessions, students practiced goal setting, academic discipline, and other non-cognitive skills.

Study Goals:

The goal of the study was to provide an overview of evaluation findings at the culmination of the College Possible grant, including impact and implementation results. The evaluation team conducted a quasi-experimental design (QED) study using two adjacent student cohorts (2018 and 2019) that included treatment and comparison students from each cohort.

Research Questions:

The research questions were:

• What was the two-year impact of the College Possible program upon high-needs high school students' non-cognitive skills, compared to similar high school students who did not participate in the program by the end of senior year?
• What was the two-year impact of the College Possible program upon high-needs high school students' high school completion rates as compared to similar high school students who did not participate into the program by the end of senior year?

Findings:

The evaluation found the following:

• The program had a small but statistically positive effect on non-cognitive skills (at p=0.01).
• The descriptive comparison of high school graduation rates showed that treatment students' graduation rates were higher than that of the comparison students.

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