Improving Outcomes of Underprivileged Youth: An Analysis on the Short and Long Term Impacts of the US TRIO Program

Abstract

The TRIO student outreach program, a federally mandated and funded college preparatory initiative designed to distinguish and aid underprivileged high school students, has provided various services and resources to thousands of individuals with the goal of ameliorating college enrollment of disadvantaged youth. The study exploits the robust data provided by the NCES’s Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 to analyze the short to long term educational and labor outcomes of the TRIO participant cohort of 2002. I employ OLS regression analysis with sets of comprehensive controls and proxies utilized by previous successful educational studies as well as instrumental variable estimation in order to ascertain the program’s effect on short-term standardized math test score gains, college enrollment, degree attainment, and long-term annual earnings. The evidence indicates that although TRIO participation has no statistically significant impact on math test score gains between the beginning of a high school student’s sophomore year and the end of their senior year or on annual earnings 8 years after high school graduation, it does have a statistically significant positive impact on a student’s propensity towards postsecondary enrollment and Bachelor’s degree attainment. These latter findings of my study concerning educational attainment outcomes coincide with the findings of the sole seminal RCT study conducted on TRIO participants of an older cohort from 1992.