Do 'No Excuses' Charter Schools Raise More than Test Scores? College-Going Impacts of a High School Network in Chicago

Abstract

While it is well-known that certain charter schools dramatically increase students' standardized test scores, there is considerably less evidence that these human capital gains persist into adulthood. To address this matter, we match three years of lottery data from a high-performing charter high school to administrative college enrollment records and estimate the effect of winning an admissions lottery on college matriculation, quality, and persistence. Seven to nine years after the lottery, we find that lottery winners are 10.0 percentage points more likely to attend college and 9.5 percentage points more likely to enroll for at least four semesters. These impacts do not come at the expense of college quality; our estimates are entirely driven by enrollment at selective, four-year institutions. Finally, we provide non-experimental evidence that more recent cohorts at other campuses increased enrollment at a similar rate. Overall, our results suggest that the causal effects of attending a No Excuses high school extend beyond graduation and into early adulthood.