The Effect of the Arizona Aims Scholarship on Undergraduate Student Outcomes.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study examined the effect of the Arizona Instrument to Measure Standards (AIMS) Scholarship on college cohort retention, college cohort completion, and college cohort time to completion—important student performance markers in an era of fiscal accountability. Over the six-year span (2006 – 2012) of this one year, renewable) full-tuition (waiver) merit-based award, a total of 25,357 Arizona high school graduates received this scholarship to attend one of Arizona’s three public universities—at a cost of $153.6 million.This quantitative research study followed Mesa Public School (MPS) graduates from 2009-2011 academic years. They were matched with Arizona State University (ASU) student directory information. The anonymized file provided student-level data from MPS through the students ASU careers. To estimate the causal effect of the AIMS Scholarship on undergraduate student performance outcomes, the researcher employed a quasi-experimental design to match students who received the AIMS Scholarship with those who did not on all the pre-treatment characteristics such as gender, minority status, socioeconomic status (SES), high school Grade Point Average (GPA), American Collee Testing (ACT) Composite, and the AIMS requirements. The only difference between the two groups (122 per group) was that one received the AIMS Scholarship, and one did not. This quasi-experimental design reduced the potential for omitted variable bias (i.e., individual motivation, familial support, etc.) and allowed for estimating the true causal effect of the AIMS Scholarship.The results of this research indicated that receiving the AIMS Scholarship appeared to have no effect on the likelihood of retention for women but had a strong positive effect on the likelihood of retention for men—a predictor for graduation. In addition, the AIMS Scholarship had a strong positive effect on the likelihood of retention for high and low SES students, but a much stronger effect for those with low SES than those with high SES. Lastly, receiving the AIMS Scholarship appeared to have no effect on the number of semesters taken to graduate for women, but appeared to increase the time to graduation for men by approximately 1.6 semesters—all important effects in an era of increased accountability for undergraduate performance outcomes and fiscal accountability.