Strengthening the Transfer Pathway: Addressing Uncertainty through Guaranteed College Admissions

This project examines the impact of guaranteed admissions through the Common App's Common Transfer Guarantee (CTG) initiative, which was implemented during the 2021-2022 application cycle. The intervention informs a randomized group of eligible applicants about up to 25 members that are four-year colleges, where the applicants qualify for guaranteed admissions based on their college grade point average (GPA), credits accumulated, community college attended, and degrees earned. Common App sends this email, which contains a list of the colleges, as well as a link to the members' college application and profile pages. The treated students receive two follow-up reminders containing information from the original email in the subsequent two months. The control group received none of this personalized information.

While the content of the intervention was substantively the same, there were two primary treatments. The first informs applicants about their guaranteed admissions eligibility based on academic progress. This eligibility pool consisted of community college students meeting certain GPA, credits completed, and degree completion thresholds for 16 4-year college and universities. The second informs applicants about their guaranteed admissions eligibility based on the degree and college attended. In this case, this eligibility pool consisted of community college students who would graduate from institutions that have articulation agreements with 9 4-year college and universities.

2021-11-01

2022-08-01

The primary outcomes are transfer application and enrollment decisions. I will first evaluate whether applicants applied to any of the 25 CTG four-year colleges offering guaranteed admissions. Since there may be spillover effects, prompting applicants to broaden their search to incorporate colleges where there is reduced uncertainty, I will also evaluate whether applicants applied to any four-year college with guaranteed admissions or an articulation agreement with their community college. Pending a match with National Student Clearinghouse, I will evaluate where students ultimately enrolled.

Secondary outcomes focus on college transfer portfolios. In other words, did the knowledge of guaranteed admissions expand a student’s college search to reach for more colleges, or did it streamline (and therefore narrow) the search to the colleges where they know an acceptance is guaranteed. Secondary outcomes include the number of transfer applications submitted, which colleges transfer students applied to, and the type of colleges that transfer students applied to (e.g. public vs. private, in-state vs. out-of-state, selective vs. broad access). An additional outcome metric is evaluating when applicants submitted their applications, and when they enrolled at a four-year college.

Assignment to treatment was randomized at the applicant level after identifying a set of eligible community college students. Due to organizational preferences and constraints, 85 percent of the final pool were randomly assigned to the treatment group while the remaining 15 percent were randomly assigned to the control group.

Not available

Randomization by a computer.

The unit of randomization is at the individual level.

No

This study does not use a clustered design.

Approximately 52,000 eligible applicants were randomized to a treatment or control group.

Roughly 35,000 are in the treatment group of the academic-based guarantee and 8,700 are in the control group of the academic-based guarantee. Roughly 6,200 are in the treatment group of the school-based guarantee (due to an articulation agreement) and roughly 1,500 are in the control group of the school-based guarantee.