Increasing the Education Attainment of Hispanics: Program Effectiveness

Abstract

The Hispanic Scholarship Fund (HSF) is seeking to double the rate at which Hispanics graduate from college with a Bachelor degree. To assist HSF in developing a strategy to reach its goal, RAND has developed information to better understand the factors that promote or impede the educational attainment of Hispanics and to identify effective policies and programs. As part of this overall effort, this report reviews what is known about the effects of four types of interventions designed to increase, directly or indirectly, the educational attainment of at-risk and/or low income students. They are: Early Childhood programs for children-at-risk; High School Dropout Prevention programs; College-Going Incentive programs; and College Retention programs. These interventions vary in their objectives, time of intervention in the lives of students, and the array of services they provide. There are a limited number of evaluation studies of these programs that meet a minimum standard of reliability. Placing ourselves, however, in the role of someone having to decide whether and where to invest to increase the education attainment of Hispanics, we concluded the following: All four types of interventions have a positive effect on the educational attainment of program participants. The size of the effect, however, varies greatly across types of interventions and across the programs within each type of intervention (Table S.1). Given the small sample sizes employed by most of the available evaluation studies a zero effect cannot be entirely discounted for each type of intervention: * Early childhood programs were estimated to increase in-grade retention from 3 to 75 percent among high-risk children and to increase the high school graduation rate from 26 to 37 percent among students who otherwise had a low graduation rate of about 50 percent.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 2001
Accession Number
ADA400063

Entities

People

  • Georges Vernez
  • Lee Mizell

Organizations

  • RAND Corporation

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Adolescents
  • African Americans
  • Age Groups
  • California
  • Crime
  • Education
  • Ethnic Groups
  • Families (Human)
  • Human Population
  • Instructors
  • Minority Groups
  • New York
  • Psychology
  • Students
  • Test And Evaluation
  • Training
  • United States

Fields of Study

  • Education

Readers

  • Naval Personnel Management
  • Psychological Intervention/Treatment for Stress, Anxiety, PTSD, and Related Emotional and Cognitive Health Symptoms.
  • STEM Education