A PROMISE-ing Change? West Virginia’s Merit Aid Program and College Enrollment

Merit-based aid is known to increase college attendance and completion. By altering the economic costs of higher education and providing incentives for academic excellence such programs increase the educational attainment of student populations. In a similar vein, West Virginia’s college scholarship program, PROMISE has been found to improve educational outcomes of college attendees and facilitate on-time degree completion among scholarship recipients. However, little is known about the scholarship’s impact on college-going rates. For a state with historically low rates of college attendance this is a pertinent question. This paper examines the effects of PROMISE on enrollments at post-secondary institutes. Using institutional-level student data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Systems (IPEDS) this study leverages the discontinuities in the timing of the scholarship’s adoption to estimate the desired causal effects. The primary analysis relies on a difference-in-difference framework and the results are verified using the synthetic control method