Information Interventions and Postsecondary Enrollment: Evidence from Appalachian Ohio

This paper examines a series of high school-level interventions designed to encourage college attendance in a historically underperforming region, Appalachian Ohio. High schools received competitive grants to combat information frictions regarding postsecondary enrollment---through campus visits, college fairs, financial aid seminars, etc. I estimate the effect of these competitive grants on postsecondary enrollment. Only Appalachian high schools were eligible for the program, and I exploit this policy-induced variation in treatment allocation to compare college attendance rates for high schools that received funding and similar, non-Appalachian high schools that were ineligible for the program using a difference-in-differences framework. Leveraging multiple datasets and treatment specifications, I document two findings: i) while college attendance generally rose during treatment, no evidence indicates that the grants increased attendance relative to similar yet untreated schools and ii) there is no evidence that attendance patterns shifted to higher-quality institutions.