Evaluation

of the

Project SOAR Demonstration

Final Report

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development | Office of Policy Development and Research

Evaluation of the Project SOAR Demonstration

Final Report

Michael DiDomenico

Rebecca Johnson

Office of Evaluation Sciences

U.S. General Services Administration

July 2020

Acknowledgments

There are many people without whom this program and the accompanying evaluation would not have been possible. Maria-Lana Queen from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) managed the SOAR program and provided instrumental help in understanding operations and connecting us with grantees. Teresa Souza was a great partner in managing the research contract and general y helped us overcome any problems we encountered. Jagruti Rekhi, Calvin Johnson, and Mark Shroder provided insightful feedback on the research design and execution. Barry Goldstein and Michael Col ins from the Department of Education were integral in helping to navigate the interagency data sharing process that al owed us to track educational outcomes. Site visitors included Mindy Ault, Justin Brock, Marissa Dolan, Richard Duckworth, Tiesha Lawrence, Daniel Marcin, Calvin Johnson, Heidi Joseph, Ransford Osafo-Danso, Jagruti Rekhi, Elizabeth Rudd, Blair Russell, Mark Schroder, and Carol Star from HUD and Crystal Hall from the Office of Evaluation Science. We received additional support and feedback from Rekha Balu, Katherine Christie, Jason Houle, Ryan Moore, Mary Clair Turner, Miles Wil iams, and the rest of the Office of Evaluation Sciences (OES) team. Final y, we are thankful to al of the people who worked tirelessly at the nine grantees to implement the program and were generous in giving us access to learn more about the chal enges and successes they faced. And a special thank you to al of the education navigators who were the ones actual y working with students to help them overcome obstacles and meet their goals.

DISCLAIMER

The contents of this report are the views of the contractor and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S.

Department of Housing and Urban Development or the U.S. Government.

Foreword

Project SOAR (Students + Opportunities + Achievements = Results), also known as “ROSS for Education,” was a 2-year demonstration conducted by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), implemented between 2017 and 2019, to expand educational services to youth living in public housing. Project SOAR provided grant funding to nine public housing agencies (PHAs) to hire education navigators to help youth between the ages of 15 and 20 to complete the necessary steps to transition to and succeed in postsecondary educational programs. The primary goal of the demonstration was to help students complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). Other grant objectives included improving financial literacy and college readiness, completing postsecondary program applications, and completing other tasks necessary for postsecondary education enrollment. As part of the grant, PHAs agreed to participate in an impact evaluation.

This report presents the results from the experimental and quasi-experimental impact evaluations and the findings from an implementation study based on site visits and a navigators’ tracking tool. The implementation study found that it took time for SOAR navigators to engage residents. Navigators encountered reluctance from residents to participate, and they provided in-person assistance to fewer than half of age-eligible residents. Both the experimental and non-experimental impact evaluations found that Project SOAR did not lead to statistically significant improvements in FAFSA completion, col ege enrollment, or Pel Grant receipt during and immediately after the completion of the grant (between October 2018 and March 2020). On average, 28 percent of eligible residents in the treatment group submitted a FAFSA application, and 29 percent enrolled in college in 2019.

SOAR was an important demonstration aimed at addressing the gap in college attendance by family income and overcoming barriers to college enrollment among HUD-assisted youth. Despite null results, the findings can assist in the design of future interventions to increase educational attainment among HUD-assisted tenants. The data match between HUD and the U.S. Department of Education demonstrated the potential of this approach for future research on housing and educational outcomes at a low cost and relatively quick turnaround.

Todd Richardson

General Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

Contents

1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 4

2 Disparities in educational opportunity ............................................................................. 5

2.1 Barriers to college . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . 5

2.2 Prior interventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . 6

3 Project SOAR design and implementation ..................................................................... 12

3.1 Program design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . 12

3.2 Implementation analysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

3.3 Implementation data sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . 14

3.4 Program development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

3.5 Outreach and engagement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . 18

3.6 Clusters of variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 26

4 Impact analysis ................................................................................................................ 28

4.1 Data and data structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

4.2 Outcome variables to be analyzed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . 31

4.3 Experimental impact analysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . 32

4.4 Non-experimental impact analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . 37

4.5 Preferred specification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

4.6 Deviations from the analysis plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . 40

5 Results .............................................................................................................................. 40

5.1 Experimental impact analysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . 40

5.2 Experimental impact analysis: complier effect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . 47

5.3 Non-experimental impact analysis: Synthetic Control Method. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . 50

6 Discussion ........................................................................................................................ 54

6.1 Limitations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . 55

6.2 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . 58

7 Appendix and supplementary materials ........................................................................ 59

7.1 Examples of the different data structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . 59

7.2 Additional details: quantitative analysis of implementation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . 61

7.3 Details on construction of analytic sample . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . 67

7.4 Replicating the random assignment process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . 68

7.5 Additional results: experimental analysis. Secondary specification for main outcome . . 70

7.6 Additional results: experimental analysis. Differences in demographics between

PHAs and across treatment conditions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

7.7 Additional results: experimental analysis. Results from models with additional

covariate adjustment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

7.8 Additional results: experimental analysis. Alternate definition of compliance. . . . . . . . . . 74

7.9 Additional results: experimental analysis. Secondary outcomes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . 76

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7.10 Additional results: synthetic control analysis. Details on analysis and construction of

the donor pool. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . 76

7.11 Additional results: synthetic control analysis. Secondary outcomes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . 81

References .............................................................................................................................. 84

List of Exhibits

Exhibit 1: Overview of prior interventions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . 9

Exhibit 2: SOAR Grantees. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . 13

Exhibit 3: Timeline of grants in relation to FAFSA cycles. Exhibit is not drawn to scale. . . . . . . . . . . 13

Exhibit 4: Match rate of individuals in the activity tracker and PIC. The match rate is defined

as the percentage of students listed in the participant tracker who could be

matched to the PIC residents file for each PHA. For shorthand in this figure and

in remaining figures, the names of Los Angeles (LA), Northwest Georgia (NW

GA), and Philadelphia (Phil y) are abbreviated. PHAs in the experimental impact

evaluation are noted with “(exp.)” below the PHA name. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . 17

Exhibit 5: Total number of interactions by type. In these counts, the unit of analysis is the

interaction. If the same student met with a navigator for four separate one-on-

one counseling sessions, it appears in the count four times. The figure shows

that while low-cost outreach methods such as mailing literature and emails

comprised the majority of interactions, interactions classified as one-on-one

counseling were also frequently reported. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . 19

Exhibit 6: Number of residents exposed to each type of interaction. In these counts, if a

student receives multiple “doses” of the same type of interaction—for example,

four in-person meetings—she only appears in the count once. The counts are

summed across al grantees. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . 20

Exhibit 7: Interaction mode by grantee. The denominator in each proportion is the number of

students within that PHA who had any interaction with the navigator. The

numerator in each proportion is the number of students with at least one

interaction falling into that category. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Exhibit 8: Random selection of one-on-one counseling text descriptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . 21

Exhibit 9: Frequency of in-person interactions over time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . 23

Exhibit 10: Proportion of eligible residents with at least one in-person interaction. The

denominator is either: (1) al students aged 15–20 in the non-experimental PHAs,

or (2) students aged 15–20 residing in treatment AMPs in the experimental

PHAs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

Exhibit 11: Demographic predictors of engagement: overal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . 26

Exhibit 12: Demographic predictors of engagement: variation within each PHA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

Exhibit 13: Clustering interaction sequences among students with at least one in-person

meeting. K-means clustering with k = 5 shows five distinct clusters of interaction

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trajectories. Cluster 1 is characterized by a high prevalence of the navigator

jointly meeting with the student and his or her parent. Cluster 4 represents a

similar focus on joint meetings but with fewer meetings overal . Clusters 2 and 3

are characterized by a high prevalence of student-only meetings, with Cluster 2

having these more spread out over the study period and Cluster 3 having a peak

in summer of 2018. Finally, Cluster 5 is characterized by many months of no in-

person meetings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 28

Exhibit 14: Time windows for each FAFSA cycle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Exhibit 15: Map of AMP randomizations in Chicago. The left panel illustrates randomization

at the AMP level. AMPs are placed at the mean latitude and longitude of units.

The sizes of the dots are scaled to the number of age-eligible youth in each

AMP. The right panel zooms in on three AMPs. The map shows how the

randomization helped minimize potential spillovers while still resulting in

neighborhoods with both treatment and control group students due to the

clustering of different AMPs in the same neighborhood. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . 34

Exhibit 16: Code snippet for randomization inference p values. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 37

Exhibit 17: Number of PHAs and residents in donor pool for synthetic control analysis. . . . . . . . . 38

Exhibit 18: Experimental analysis: sample demographics. Demographics correspond to the

analytic sample for eligible for the 2019–2020 FAFSA cycle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . 42

Exhibit 19: Raw counts and percentages for outcomes. Al refer to the 2019–2020 cycle and

show counts and percentages before reweighting by the inverse probability of

randomization. For the FAFSA counts, the denominator is residents aged 17–20;

for the Pell and col ege counts, the denominator is shifted forward a year to

residents aged 18–21. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

Exhibit 20: Randomization Inference results for FAFSA Completion 2019–2020 cycle (blocking

variables only): Distribution of permuted treatment coefficients. The figure shows

that the observed treatment coefficient is neither larger nor smal er than the

majority of permuted treatment coefficients, indicating a null effect. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 43

Exhibit 21: Descriptive rates of FAFSA Completion (2019–2020 cycle). The proportions are

reweighted by the IPT weights, but otherwise do not adjust for covariates. The

figure shows that in al PHAs except for Seattle, there were slightly lower

completion rates among treatment group members, with large amounts of

variation in the raw levels between PHAs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . 44

Exhibit 22: Randomization Inference results for FAFSA Completion 2019-2020 cycle

(blocking variables only): Proportions. Shows observed control mean and

observed treatment mean. 95% confidence intervals on control mean are based

standard error of mean; 95% confidence interval (CI) on treatment mean are

from adding the control mean to the 2.5th and 97.5th percentile of distribution

of permuted treatment coefficients from randomization inference. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

Exhibit 23: Parametric results for FAFSA Completion 2019–2020 cycle (blocking variables

only): Combined across PHAs. Shows observed control mean and for treatment,

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the control mean plus the treatment coefficient. 95% CI on control mean are

based standard error of mean; 95% CI on treatment mean are based on the

standard error of the mean and the standard error of the estimated treatment

effect. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

Exhibit 24: Parametric results for FAFSA Completion 2019–2020 cycle (blocking variables

only): Separate by PHA. Shows predicted values and 95% CI for each PHA. Other

covariates in the model are set to their PHA-specific means. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . 46

Exhibit 25: Randomization Inference results for FAFSA Completion 2019–2020 cycle

(blocking + additional covariate adjustment): Distribution of permuted treatment

coefficients. The figure shows that the observed treatment coefficient is larger

than the majority of permuted coefficients, but that there is a high degree of

instability in these coefficients and that the difference is not statistical y

significant. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . 47

Exhibit 26: Rates of compliance by PHA and group assignment. The denominator of each is

the number of age-eligible and residentially-eligible students in the group. The

numerator of each is the number of these eligible residents who met at least

once in person with a navigator. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . 48

Exhibit 27: Effect of treatment on compliers: main definition of compliance. The exhibit

shows results from the two stage least squares method of analyzing complier

effects discussed in Section 4.3. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . 49

Exhibit 28: Trends in FAFSA completion: non-experimental treatment PHAs. Each dot on the

graph represents the completion rate among those who met the eligibility

criteria (age-eligible and a resident of the PHA at some point during the cycle).

The missing dot in the 2016–2017 cycle for NW GA is due to the redaction of <

10 cel count. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . 51

Exhibit 29: Synthetic control treatment effect on FAFSA completion by year. The results are

positive in the focal treatment year (2019–2020 FAFSA cycle) but not statistically

significant ( p = 0.28). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

Exhibit 30: Synthetic control results. The PHA-year specification corresponds to the

specification where we retain PHAs in the donor pool as long as they have at

least one non-redacted year of FAFSA data, with the PHA only serving as a donor

during the observed years (Exhibit 29). The PHA specification corresponds to the

specification that removes al PHAs with any redacted FAFSA cycles (Exhibit 31).

The highlighted year was the main pre-registered primary outcome of interest. . . . . 53

Exhibit 31: Synthetic control treatment effect on FAFSA completion by year: removal of PHAs

with any redaction. The figure shows the ATT for each of the treatment years. The

result is positive and borderline significant ( p = 0.08). In addition to changes in the

donor pool for this model (PHAs with no redaction in FAFSA completion), the

model also excludes the one treatment PHA (NW GA) with a redacted FAFSA cycle. . 54

Exhibit 32: Example of data structure for AMP-level data (used for experimental analysis) . . . . . . 60

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Exhibit 33: Example of data structure for individual-level data (used for descriptive

engagement analysis and adjusting causal analysis for the proportion of youth

engaged) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . 60

Exhibit 34: Example of data structure for PHA-level data (used for quasi-experimental

analysis of effect of navigators on residents of sites that did not randomize) . . . . . . . 61

Exhibit 35: Definitions for key interaction tracker elements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . 63

Exhibit 36: Variation in interaction trackers’ inputted data within the same field. The left

panel shows variation within the converser field; the right panel shows variation

within the medium/mode field. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . 64

Exhibit 37: Top words in free-text notes on one-on-one counseling: experimental PHAs . . . . . . . 65

Exhibit 38: Top words in free-text notes on one-on-one counseling: non-experimental PHAs . . 66

Exhibit 39: Il ustration of sequences with 20 randomly-chosen students . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . 66

Exhibit 40: Code snippet for defining eligibility to appear in a cycle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . 67

Exhibit 41: Race/ethnicity comparison across PHAs and AMPs. Each dot represents one

modified AMP used in randomization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

Exhibit 42: Household income comparison across PHAs and AMPs. Each bar represents one

modified AMP used in randomization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

Exhibit 43: Differences between treatment and control AMPs: Full sample; raw differences

since al variables are aggregated to the AMP level, the figure shows either the

mean proportions (binary variables) or mean values (continuous variables) across

treatment and control AMPs. Al are reweighted by the inverse probability of

treatment weighting (IPTW). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . 72

Exhibit 44: Differences between treatment and control AMPs: full sample and by PHA;

standardized difference in means. Each dot either represents one PHA for al

PHAs (gray). Al estimates are reweighted by the IPTW. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . 72

Exhibit 45: Randomization Inference results for FAFSA Completion 2019–2020 cycle

(blocking + additional covariate adjustment): proportions. Shows observed

control mean and observed treatment mean. 95% confidence intervals on

control mean are based standard error of mean; 95% CI on treatment mean are

from adding the control mean to the 2.5th and 97.5th percentile of distribution

of permuted treatment coefficients from randomization inference. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

Exhibit 46: Parametric results for FAFSA Completion 2019–2020 cycle (blocking + additional

covariate adjustment): combined across PHAs. Shows observed control mean

and for treatment, the control mean plus the treatment coefficient. 95% CI on

control mean are based standard error of mean; 95% CI on treatment mean are

vart + varint − 2 ∗ covar(t, int). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . 74

Exhibit 47: Parametric results for FAFSA Completion 2019–2020 cycle (blocking + additional

covariate adjustment): separate by PHA. Shows predicted values and 95% CI for

each PHA. Other covariates in the model are set to their PHA-specific means. . . . . . . 74

Exhibit 48: Effect of treatment on compliers: alternate definition of compliance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

Exhibit 49: Experimental results: secondary outcomes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . 76

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Exhibit 50: Trends in FAFSA completion: non-experimental treatment PHAs (separating

counts of completion from counts of age and residential y eligible). The figure

shows general declines in the 17–20 populations in some PHAs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . 77

Exhibit 51: Redaction of FAFSA counts due to smal cel sizes. The figure shows a high count

of PHAs that, due to their low number of youth residents, had fewer than ten

students complete the FAFSA across many cycles, leading to redaction. . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

Exhibit 52: Redaction of FAFSA counts due to small cell sizes: pre- versus post-treatment

years. The figure shows that the majority of PHAs have 0 non-redacted values in

both the pre-treatment FAFSA cycles and the post-treatment FAFSA cycles. This

decreases the concern that removing PHAs with redaction from the donor pool

induces post-treatment bias. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . 78

Exhibit 53: Comparison of donor pool PHAs with treatment PHAs: resident attributes. The

bars represent the mean across that group of PHA. Attributes are from the

Picture of Subsidized Housing data using the year 2016, a pre-treatment year

that corresponds roughly to the year that PHAs would be applying to SOAR. . . . . . . 80

Exhibit 54: Comparison of donor pool PHAs with treatment PHAs: locations. The gray dots

represent PHAs that are not in the donor pool due to redaction; the yellow dots

represent PHAs always in the donor pool; the ochre dots represent PHAs

sometimes contributing to the donor pool depending on the year. The map of

these PHAs in relation to the focal treatment PHAs shows that, rather than being

spatial y proximate, the donor PHAs might represent those in other larger

suburbs/cities within the state. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . 80

Exhibit 55: Observed trends in treated PHA versus counterfactual trends based on donor

PHAs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

Exhibit 56: FAFSA completion versus col ege enrol ment. Each dot represents the rate for

one PHA-cycle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . 82

Exhibit 57: Synthetic control treatment effect on Pell receipt by year . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . . . . . . . . . 82

Exhibit 58: Synthetic control treatment effect on col ege enrol ment by year . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... . 83

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Abstract

Project SOAR (Students + Opportunities + Achievements = Results), also known as ROSS for Education, was a demonstration program reflecting the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) commitment to expand educational services to youth living in HUD-assisted housing. Project SOAR provided grant funding to nine public housing authorities (PHAs) to hire and deploy counselors—or “education navigators”—to help youth between the ages of 15 and 20 living in public housing complete the necessary steps to transition to and succeed in postsecondary educational programs.

The overal goal of this study is to explore whether the SOAR grants improved postsecondary outcomes. The outcomes of interest include completion of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), col ege enrol ment, and receipt of a Pell Grant. In evaluating SOAR’s impact on these outcomes, the study contributes to a large body of literature on how to reduce disparities in educational opportunity (Section 2). Past research shows that for low-income students, interventions that involve less time and resources—for instance, letter or email outreach campaigns—can fail to change long-term outcomes. Project SOAR navigators were trained to not only provide informational materials about steps like completing the FAFSA but also to supplement the information with hands-on assistance and support.

To document program implementation (Section 3), the report draws on two sources of data: qualitative notes from site visits to the grantees and detailed records that navigators kept about their outreach efforts and interactions with residents. The key findings are that: 1. SOAR navigators needed time to establish themselves in the community and engage residents. In the site visits, navigators reported the importance of taking the time to get to know residents and establishing themselves in the community. In the quantitative data, navigators’ interactions with residents started off slowly but began to meaningfully increase by the summer of 2018. This means that navigators had limited interactions with residents to prepare them for the first focal FAFSA season. In addition, by the time navigators were building more recognition in the community, grantees were already under pressure to spend the funds prior to the grant’s termination.

2. SOAR navigators were only able to provide in-person assistance to a subset of age-eligible residents. While navigators were able to reach many residents through methods like mailings and e-mail, they were only able to meet one-quarter to one-half of residents at least once in person. The low level of engagement has important implications for the main analysis, which estimates the average effect among all eligible residents.

3. Among residents who met in person with navigators, there was wide variation in the frequency and number of attendees at those meetings. Decisions to complete the FAFSA and enroll in college are often family-level rather than student-level; that is, 1

students weigh the benefits of postsecondary education against chal enges such as getting their parents to provide the necessary financial information or pressure to forgo college for immediate earnings. We see wide variation, however, in whether and where families of students were engaged. Some sites often included parents and caregivers as attendees in navigator meetings; other sites rarely did so.

Section 4 discusses the methods used for the impact evaluation. First, in four of the nine PHAs, residents were randomized to treatment and control conditions by clusters of buildings (Asset Management Projects, or AMPs). The primary analysis estimates the Intent-to-Treat (ITT) effect of SOAR. An exploratory analysis also examines the estimated effect of SOAR on youth who met with a navigator in-person at least once. A secondary analysis of the remaining five PHAs that did not randomize residents to assistance uses a non-experimental design to evaluate the impact of SOAR. A synthetic control method matches the non-experimental SOAR PHAs to other PHAs with similar trajectories of FAFSA completion (and other postsecondary outcomes) prior to the SOAR grant period and examines whether the five PHAs had higher-than-expected FAFSA completion rates given their trajectories.

Section 5 presents the results. The key findings are that: 1. Based on the experimental analysis, SOAR did not lead to statistically significant improvements in FAFSA completion, college enrollment, or Pell Grant receipt.

Treatment AMPs had slightly lower completion rates than control AMPs, but the differences were not distinguishable from zero.

2. Based on the non-experimental analysis, SOAR did not lead to statistically significant improvements in FAFSA completion, college enrollment, or Pell Grant receipt. SOAR may have led to some improvements relative to PHAs that did not receive any SOAR funding, but we cannot rule out that the improvements were due to chance.

Section 6 discusses the findings and their policy implications. SOAR navigators faced a difficult task. In a short time period, they needed to get to know a large number of PHA residents and their families, begin providing services to these residents, and guide them through complicated financial aid and col ege enrol ment decisions. The results show that the SOAR model, when evaluated as the average effect across PHAs, did not lead to meaningful improvements in postsecondary outcomes. The results leave open the possibility that the SOAR model, implemented differently, could produce improvements. For instance, a model that requires youth to express interest in a navigator, or that partners with a local school district to identify students for help, could help navigators focus services on the students for whom their assistance makes a larger difference.

Overal , while past research shows that the SOAR model of in-person assistance can be effective for low-income youth, the program model needs to be more defined, sufficient resources must be in place to support navigators, and more effort needs to be made to focus on the students who are both interested in college and in need of additional assistance.

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1 Introduction

Project SOAR (Students + Opportunities + Achievements = Results), also known as ROSS for Education, was a demonstration program reflecting the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) commitment to expand educational services to youth living in HUD-assisted housing. 1 Project SOAR provided grant funding to nine public housing authorities (PHAs) to hire and deploy counselors—or “education navigators”—to help youth between the ages of 15 and 20 living in public housing complete the necessary steps to transition to and succeed in postsecondary educational programs. The most emphasized step was to complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). 2,3 Other targeted activities included increasing financial literacy and col ege readiness, completing program applications, and completing other administrative steps necessary for enrol ment.

The Office of Evaluation Sciences (OES) at the U.S. General Services Administration worked with HUD to design an evaluation of Project SOAR to understand program implementation and ultimately learn the extent to which Project SOAR improved postsecondary outcomes for eligible students. This report summarizes the findings of both the implementation study and the impact evaluation. This research adds to the body of evidence exploring the effectiveness of col ege access interventions.

The remainder of this report is structured as fol ows. Section 2 discusses the disparities in col ege access among students from low-income families compared with their more-affluent peers and summarizes prior research of interventions designed to increase low-income students’

postsecondary access and success. Section 3 discusses how the SOAR intervention was designed and implemented. Section 4 discusses both the planned experimental and non-experimental methods used to estimate the impact of Project SOAR on key outcomes of interest. Section 5

describes the estimated effects of Project SOAR. Previewing the results, the analysis suggests that SOAR had no statistical y significant impact on either FAFSA completion or col ege enrol ment. There was also, however, wide variation in how the intervention was delivered by each grantee, and navigators only engaged a limited subset of eligible residents. Section 6 offers some interpretation of the results and suggestions for future research and policy efforts.

1 In this report col ege is used interchangeably with postsecondary educational programs more general y and includes not only 4- and 2-year college programs but also any other Title IV eligible institution of higher education at which U.S.

federal student aid can be used. We also use the terms student and (eligible) youth interchangeably in the context of who was targeted by and participated in services made possible by Project SOAR grants, even though in some cases the person engaged with an education navigator may not have been a student enrol ed in high school or college.

2 The report uses PHA and grantee interchangeably when referring to PHAs that hired education navigators.

3 The decision to focus on residents aged 15–20 was based on (1) the desire to use some eligibility criteria to make the navigators’ task of assisting residents more feasible, and (2) the assumption that a higher proportion of 15–20-year-olds were interested in col ege than, for instance, 25–30-year-olds.

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2 Disparities in educational opportunity

Project SOAR was designed to help reduce persistent gaps in col ege-going between students from low-income families and their more affluent peers. Students from families with a lower socioeconomic status (SES) both attend and graduate from col ege at lower rates than students from wealthier families, even when taking into account measures of academic preparation. 4 For example, among students with math scores in the top two quintiles, only 63 percent of students in lower SES families are enrol ed in col ege within 3 years of high school graduation, whereas 85

percent of students from high SES families are (Ma, Pender, and Welch, 2019). Even when looking at some of the best-prepared high school students—those with a GPA between 3.5 and 4.0—the 6-year completion rate among those who enrol at a public, 4-year col ege is 61

percent for students from lower SES families compared to a rate of 89 percent for students from higher SES families (Ma, Pender, and Welch, 2019).

2.1 Barriers to college

There are multiple barriers for students on the path to a postsecondary education that can help explain these disparities. Of particular relevance to low-income families are barriers related to financial constraints, including a lack of information about the financial aid process.

Information about financial aid: Understanding the financial aid process is crucial for students from low-income families. While the sticker price of col ege has increased rapidly over the past 2

decades, the out-of-pocket costs for low-income students have remained fairly low because of the availability of financial aid. For example, while the average published price of tuition and fees for a ful -time student at a public 4-year university increased from $5,170 in the 1999–2000

school year to $10,140 in the 2015–2016 school year (both in 2019 dol ars), the net tuition and fees after grant aid for a dependent student whose parents earned less than $35,000 per year were only $2,340 for the 2015–2016 school year (Ma et al. , 2019). Unfortunately, many low-income families may have inaccurate information about the out-of-pocket costs of col ege. In surveys, low-income families have overestimated costs by between 80 and 150 percent (Scott-Clayton, 2012).

One common source of information for students is family or friends who have had to navigate the col ege-enrol ment process before. Low-income students are more likely to lack these resources because they are more likely to be the first in their family to go to col ege, and the community resources to which they have access may be less robust. Staff at five SOAR grantee sites reported that low-performing and low-resourced high schools limited youths’ academic preparation and access to peers or counselors who could help them navigate the col ege enrol ment process. 5 In particular, respondents reported schools had no counselors or had very 4 In this paragraph, high SES is defined as the top two quintiles or approximately above the 60th percentile. Low SES is defined as the bottom two quintiles, or roughly at or below the 40th percentile. SES is not only a measure of household income but also considers parental education and occupations (Ma, Pender, and Welch, 2019).

5 Grantee observations were col ected from a set of site visits described in further detail in Section 3.2.

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high counselor-to-student ratios in some cities, and school choice systems were viewed as fragmented, limiting students’ ability to attend high-quality and well-resourced schools. This lack of information can discourage some students from going to col ege because they may incorrectly assume it is not affordable or otherwise within reach.

Financial constraints: Youth in public housing can face a considerable amount of pressure to prioritize helping with family obligations over postsecondary education. Grantee staff suggested that residents tend to prioritize the near term over potential future payoffs when making col ege enrol ment decisions. For example, parents in many cases wanted youth to help with the household and care for siblings in the immediate term rather than go to col ege to earn money that could support the family several years later. Many youth wanted to work right away and often had not considered Career Technical Education or certificate programs that could be completed quickly. 6 Given these pressures, part of the job of navigators was to better inform SOAR

participants about the available options to help them make more-informed decisions about their futures.

Low-income families also are more likely to face setbacks from small financial barriers and opportunity costs related to the col ege-enrol ment process. For example, grantees reported residents had difficulty paying smal fees, and that in some cases there were limited fee waivers for the ACT and SAT tests. One grantee reported that even though a statewide fee waiver existed for traditional public school students, they were not available to youth who attended charter schools. These fees could prevent otherwise interested students from taking the necessary steps for applying to col ege. One role of navigators was to help students navigate the procedures for obtaining fee waivers for tests and applications to reduce this barrier.

Although barriers related to financial information and other financial constraints are among the most important faced by students from low-income families, grantee staff cited many additional barriers, including worries about childcare for youth with their own children, general problems with procrastination, and reluctance among the student’s parents to share financial information.

While SOAR was designed with a focus on reducing financial barriers by helping students understand the financial aid process, most navigators saw their role as identifying any number of barriers and helping where they could.

2.2 Prior interventions

There have been many attempts at reducing barriers to col ege access among low-income students and increasing the success of those who enrol . Col ege access and col ege success interventions range from those which are extremely light touch (for example, one-way text messages, not personalized to the student) to those which are very intensive (such as significant 6 Interestingly, some of the push to earn money quickly could be considered rational in an economic sense. Carrell and Sacerdote (2017) find in a survey that male high school students predict their wages with only a high school degree to be 52 percent higher than females expect, and ACS data suggest that in New Hampshire, where the study took place, high school men do, in fact, earn about as much as men with 1 to 3 years of col ege.

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in-person assistance combined with additional financial and academic supports). Exhibit 1

summarizes prior research (in rough order of increasing intervention intensity). Light-touch interventions have gained significant popularity recently, not the least because they can be easy to implement and fund at a large scale, meaning even smal gains can be cost-efficient. The emerging consensus, though, seems to be that while light-touch interventions have been effective in some cases, the positive effects of light-touch interventions are difficult to replicate, especial y when they are taken to scale.

Over the last decade, there has been an explosion in the number of evaluations of light-touch,

“nudge” interventions aimed at increasing col ege enrol ment and persistence. These efforts have occasional y shown promise, but their effectiveness has been uneven. Early efforts to increase col ege enrol ment (Castleman and Page, 2015) and FAFSA renewal (Castleman and Page, 2016) with encouraging text messages were effective at increasing 2-year col ege enrol ment and persistence, respectively, but were not successful at changing 4-year col ege outcomes. Efforts at scaling these early interventions did not show effects (Bird et al. , 2017).

Page, Castleman, and Meyer (2020) finds that emails to students were able to increase FAFSA completion in the short run, but the effects deteriorated over time and were not significant within a few months. An intervention undertaken by the Department of Education’s Office of Federal Student Aid was effective at increasing FAFSA completion rates with a simple email, although the effects were only measured over a 20-day period, and the persistence of the effect is unknown (OES, 2017). There have been some successes with light-touch, communications-based interventions, but the mechanism for why they work in some cases is poorly understood, meaning it is not likely that designing just any communication intervention is likely to change behavior.

Since 2016, HUD has attempted three interventions geared towards increasing FAFSA completion among residents. Al three focused on informative communications—sent via postal mail, email, and robocall—broadly targeted to residents either between 17 to 20 years of age or between 17 to 24 years of age (OES, 2016, 2019a, 2019b). None of these efforts significantly improved FAFSA completion. Taken together, the results of the HUD experiments and attempts by other researchers suggest that information alone general y is not enough to elicit action.

Two studies that provide a more direct comparison of interventions with different levels of intensity seem to support the general conclusion that information alone is not enough to change behavior. Bettinger et al. (2012) tests one intervention that provides low-income students interested in learning more about col ege financing with information about likely financial aid packages and encouragement to complete the FAFSA on their own. That intervention was ineffective. However, when the same information was paired with in-person help by the tax preparer to complete and submit the FAFSA, students both completed the FAFSA at significantly higher rates and attended col ege at higher rates. In a similar vein, Carrell and Sacerdote (2017) test both an intervention in which col eges send information to potential students indicating the col eges’ interest in the students, which was not effective, and a much 7

more intensive intervention that offered a combination of weekly academic mentoring, financial support, and financial incentives for completing activities related to col ege applications, which was effective.

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Exhibit 1: Overview of prior interventions

Study

Intervention

Population

Effect

OES (2016)

Sent residents one of nine

Residents ages 17–20 who lived No significant effect.

letter variations encouraging

in households (nationwide)

FAFSA completion.

using Housing Choice

Vouchers.

OES (2019a)

Sent a combination of four

Residents of the New York City No significant effect.

mailings, three emails (for

Housing Authority ages 17–24.

those with email addresses),

and one robocall to encourage

FAFSA completion.

OES (2019b)

Sent two letters encouraging

Youth living in public housing No significant effect.

FAFSA completion.

at the Seattle Housing

Authority and King County

Housing Authority ages 17–24.

Castleman and Sent students a series of two-

High school students in Boston, The text messages increased 2-

Page (2015)

way text messages related to

Dallas, and Philadelphia.

year enrol ment by about 3

tasks students accepted to

percentage points, on average,

col ege need to take prior to

but did not significantly change

starting col ege in the fal .

overall enrollment.

Castleman and Sent first time freshmen

First time col ege freshmen

Increased enrol ment in the

Page (2016)

students a series of 12 text

who participated in Castleman sophomore year for community

messages focusing on the

and Page (2015).

col ege students by around 12–

importance of renewing their

14 percentage points, but no

FAFSAs.

effect on 4-year students.

Page,

Two-way text messages to

High school students in Texas. There was an increase in FAFSA

Castleman, and students updating them on

completion over the short run,

Meyer (2020)

where they were in the FAFSA

but the effect decreased and

process (such as not started,

was not significant by the end of

started but not submitted,

summer.

submitted and selected for

verification).

OES (2017)

Federal Student Aid sent emails Approximately 14 million

Increased FAFSA renewal rates

to students reminding them to students who filed a FAFSA for by 3.4 percentage points over a refile their FAFSAs and alerting the previous (2016–2017)

control group the first 20 days

them to changes in the FAFSA academic year.

after the email.

process for the current cycle.

Bird et al. (2017) Sent a series of text messages Students enrolled in the The intervention did not

encouraging FAFSA

Common Application

change the rate of FAFSA

completion.

(nationwide) who were low-

completion but did lead to a

income or first-generation

small increase in college

col ege students.

enrollment, mainly driven by an

increase in people going to 2-

year programs who otherwise

would not have enrolled in a

program.

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Study

Intervention

Population

Effect

Phillips and

One condition sent email and

Low SES, college-interested,

The advising intervention

Reber (2019)

text messages reminding

high school juniors in California increased applications to 4-

students of key activities and

who applied for the program.

year col eges, but neither

deadlines. Another condition

intervention had a significant

added the assistance of an

effect on col ege enrol ment.

advisor who communicated

with students via email, text,

and phone calls.

Bettinger et al. Provided estimates of financial Low-income students between Increased FAFSA completion

(2012)

aid based on tax information.

15–30 years old getting tax

by 16 percentage points and

One condition provided only

preparation at H&R Block who college enrollment by 8

the information and

say they are interested in

percentage points for

encouragement for people to

learning more about col ege

dependent students in the

fil out the FAFSA on their own. finances.

personal assistance

A separate condition

condition, but no effect for

automatically filled in most of

information only.

the FAFSA with tax information

and offered personal assistance

from the tax preparer to

complete the rest of the FAFSA.

Scrivener et al.

Provides intensive counseling, Low-income students at three Increased 3-year graduation

(2015)

tutoring, and career advising,

New York City community

from 22 to 40 percent. Also

last dol ar funding, transit cards col eges in need of

increased credits earned by 9

for NYC, free use of textbooks. developmental coursework

credits (39 to 48 credits) and

Requires full time enrollment

who were willing to attend

increased enrol ment in 4-year

and emphasizes developmental college ful time.

col eges 17 to 25 percent.

courses and graduation within

3 years.

Miller et al.

Replication of Scrivener et al.

Low-income students at three Increased 3-year graduation

(2020)

(2015) in three Ohio

Ohio community colleges in

from 19 to 35 percent.

community colleges.

need of developmental

Increased 4-year col ege

coursework who were wil ing to enrol ment from 12 to 18

attend col ege ful time.

percent. Increased credits

earned after 3 years by 8.5

credits.

Bertrand et al.

Intensive advising, tutoring,

Low-income students in

Increase in col ege enrol ment

(2019)

professional mentorship,

Chicago planning to enroll or

of between 7 and 9 percentage

financial support, and financial already enrolled in community points, increase in full-time incentives.

college.

enrol ment of 13 percentage

points, and an increase in

persistence to spring of 11

percentage points.

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Study

Intervention

Population

Effect

Carrell and

One intervention includes

High school students in New

The intensive intervention

Sacerdote

mentoring by a Dartmouth

Hampshire who have expressed increased college enrollment

(2017)

student, paying for application interest in col ege but have not by 6 percentage points, driven and test fees, and a financial

completed an application.

entirely by increases in women

incentive for completing

going to 4-year schools. The

activities. A second intervention

interest letter was not effective.

asks col eges to send students

a personalized letter and emails

saying the col ege is interested

in them.

Note: Al studies used experimental designs except for the HUD Seattle and King County study, which used a synthetic control method.

The research suggests that more intensive interventions more consistently produce significant and sizable gains in col ege enrol ment and persistence. The interventions studied by Scrivener et al. (2015), Miller et al. (2020), Bertrand et al. (2019), and Carrel and Sacerdote (2017) all include a combination of intensive academic advising and mentoring and financial support in the form of scholarships, monetary incentives, or in-kind benefits like the use of textbooks or a transit card. Providing this more holistic array of supports has more consistently shown large impacts, even when replicated, as was done with the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) intervention (Scrivener et al. , 2015; Miller et al. , 2020).

One key feature of the interventions cited (regardless of intervention intensity) is that they are general y targeted at students who have been identified as interested in and academical y prepared for col ege. For instance, Page et al. (2019) studied the impact of a program targeted at “low-income students identified as having the potential to enrol and succeed in col ege” (p.

6). Carrel and Sacerdote (2017) selected a population where “The high school guidance departments identify students who have expressed interest in col ege but have taken few or no steps to apply. The intent is to capture students who are right at the margin of applying to college or failing to apply” (p. 126). Phil ips and Reber (2019) studied a program that “targeted students who were likely to be eligible for admission to public 4-year colleges in California based on their prior grades and course-taking” and who “had relatively high-grade point averages (about 75 percent reported B averages or above) and very high educational aspirations (nearly 80 percent aspired to a graduate degree)” (p. 8). The specific targeting of these interventions helps limit the study to students who are likely col ege-interested, but it also could mean that a large part of the sample wil go to col ege regardless of the intervention.

The present intervention targeted public housing residents by age rather than by high school grades or interest in col ege. This choice was largely due to the lack of any educational data col ected directly by HUD, but it makes the design a relatively novel attempt not only to help students already interested in col ege but also to potential y foster col ege aspirations. Grantees mentioned in several interviews that they felt SOAR was important, in part because it is able to proactively reach some students who are missed by other programs that rely on students to 11

actively engage in col ege preparation before being recruited into an intervention. But while SOAR

had the benefit of reaching students who wanted and needed help but who might have been missed by other programs, it also likely targeted youth who either were not col ege-interested and had made other plans or who were planning to go to col ege and did not require any assistance to do so, which could make the effectiveness of the program more difficult to measure.

3 Project SOAR design and implementation

3.1 Program design

Project SOAR targeted multiple behaviors related to pursuing a postsecondary education. Each grantee, a PHA, hired between one and three navigators to help residents between 15 to 20

years of age. Each navigator was expected to assist approximately 100 to 125 students over the course of a year. While the primary goal of the intervention was to help students complete the FAFSA, there were four total objectives specified in the grant announcement: 1. Help students complete the FAFSA.

2. Improve student financial literacy and col ege readiness.

3. Help students complete postsecondary program applications.

4. Help students complete tasks necessary for enrol ment. 7

Nine PHAs were selected for the demonstration and were funded to employ education navigators to carry out tasks in support of the main program objectives. Exhibit 2 lists each housing authority and the number of navigators awarded to each. As part of the grant, PHAs agreed to participate in an evaluation. The four grantees that participated in the experimental impact evaluation—where navigators were randomly assigned to help a subset of eligible residents—are listed in bold. The remaining five grantees were part of a non-experimental component of the impact evaluation. The exhibit also includes the number of 15- to 20-year-olds who were living in public housing at each PHA at the time of the grant award and the number of youth each PHA proposed to serve. 8

Exhibit 3 summarizes the timeline of the grants relative to the two FAFSA cycles that occurred while navigators were providing services. The grants were awarded in May 2017, and grantees were encouraged to hire navigators early in the summer so they could be in place and offering services prior to the start of the 2018–2019 FAFSA season, which began on October 1, 2017. 9

7 Those tasks included both ones preliminary to the FAFSA and applications, like forming a “Col ege Action Plan” where students outline the timeline for completing key steps, as well as tasks related to avoiding “summer melt” where students who enrol in a col ege do not show up, such as help registering for courses and figuring out their living arrangements.

8 The number of navigators was roughly scaled to the size of the eligible student population that PHAs reported to HUD

when PHAs applied for the grants. PHAs also differed in whether the navigators were employed ful time or part time.

9 Since the 2016–2017 season, each FAFSA cycle runs for 21 months from October 1 of the year preceding the intended school year to June 30 of the same school year. For example, if a student intended to attend col ege in the 2019–2020 school year, she could complete the FAFSA at any point between October 1, 2018 and June 30, 2020.

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Exhibit 2: SOAR Grantees.

Total

Residents

PHA

State

Residents

Residents Navigators per

to Serve

15–20

Navigator

Chicago Housing Authority

IL

3,207

750

3

250

Philadelphia Housing Authority

PA

3,189

250

2

125

Housing Authority of the City of

CA

3,103

250

3

83

Los Angeles

Seattle Housing Authority

WA

862

427

3

142

City of Phoenix Housing Department AZ

655

298

3

99

Housing Authority of the City of

WI

536

208

1

208

Milwaukee

High Point Housing Authority

NC

312

347

1

347

Prichard Housing Authority

AL

119

101

1

101

Northwest Georgia Housing Authority GA

89

80

1

80

Note: Grantees in bold are included in the experimental evaluation. Other grantees are included in the nonexperimental evaluation. The sample sizes represent estimates at the time of randomization, which are distinct from the actual, analytic sample sizes depicted in Exhibit 18.

Exhibit 3: Timeline of grants in relation to FAFSA cycles. Exhibit is not drawn to scale.

Given the differing speed of the hiring process, each grantee effectively began providing services at different points in time between August and November 2017. 10 The grant supported navigators through April 2019, which means that the navigators’ services could help students 10 As a result, the end date of hiring and start date of services in Exhibit 3 is an approximation and varies across PHAs.

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with both the 2018–2019 FAFSA season and the 2019–2020 FAFSA season. 11 As is discussed further in Section 3, it took grantees time to ramp up and develop a steady state of program activities. As such, it was more likely for navigators to have an impact in the second year of the grant (for example, from summer 2018), and the primary analysis focuses on FAFSA completion for the 2019–2020 school year. 12

3.2 Implementation analysis

Project SOAR was designed to utilize features of both lighter-touch and more intensive interventions. Navigators were told to focus on lighter-touch interactions for important one-time actions (such as personalized FAFSA completion assistance) and encourage fol ow-through on those actions (for example, frequent check-ins) while supplementing lighter-touch efforts with more intensive interactions for those who wanted it (such as one-on-one assistance with col ege search, scholarship search, or academic preparation).

The grant was designed to give PHAs maximum flexibility to tailor their program models to local context. As such, what navigators were doing at each grantee site looked somewhat different.

This local variation has implications for whom navigators focused their outreach efforts on, who they ended up engaging, and the content of engagements. To understand better how SOAR was implemented, the research team completed an implementation analysis based on a set of site visits to grantees and an exploration of data col ected on navigator-resident interactions col ected by grantees.

3.3 Implementation data sources

Two main data sources inform the implementation analysis: data gathered from site visits to grantees and data col ected by grantees on program participants and activities.

Implementation site visits

Site visits were conducted in July and August 2018 by teams of between two and four staff members from OES and HUD. 13 Most site visits took place over two days, although for some of the smal er grantees, site visits were completed over the course of a single day. Each visit included interviews with education navigators, grantee staff responsible for overseeing day-to-day operations of Project SOAR and direct management of education navigators, and grantee leadership. Site visitors were provided with interview guides to create semi-structured conversations that covered the same general topics but al owed for the interviewers to probe for more detail according to their discretion. When possible, site visits also included observations of 11 Grantees were al owed to continue providing services until September 30, 2019, if they had unobligated funds after April.

12 As we discuss later, the timing of our analysis means that our observations of the 2019–2020 FAFSA season are truncated to the last application dates we can observe in the Department of Education data before matching, which was March 12, 2020.

13 There is a more detailed report related to implementation available from HUD upon request.

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interactions with potential SOAR participants, observations of group events, and visits to several of the housing developments. Site visitors were asked to record notes of their interactions and observations, but the observations were not structured.

One limitation of the site visits is that young adults and their families were not interviewed directly. The decision was made only to speak with grantee staff, so the study team did not have to take additional steps that would be needed to get a research design approved that involved interviewing young adults and their families. As such, any descriptions of the chal enges faced by young adults and their families reflect grantee staff’s understanding of the situation gained from their interactions with young adults and their families—in other words, most of the information generated from the site visits is second-hand.

At the completion of each site visit, the site visit team was asked to document their notes and write a summary of the visit in a provided template. The study team decided not to record or transcribe conversations because the purpose of the site visits was to understand general experiences and think about opportunities for program improvement rather than to provide the types of “thick description” seen in other types of qualitative analyses.

For the analysis, the study team completed a preliminary review of site visit summaries and had a meeting to identify key themes and settle on a coding schema. Two reviewers then coded notes from one grantee, and the codes were compared to discuss decisions and improve reliability. The two reviewers then coded the remaining site visit summaries (each site was coded by one reviewer), referring to interaction-specific notes when possible. The coding schema focused on identifying structural and behavioral barriers and facilitators to taking action falling into three general categories: attributes and activities of the Project SOAR model, community context and programs, and descriptions of residents (including their financial circumstances and postsecondary awareness).

SOAR data systems

For Project SOAR, HUD developed a data tracking tool that navigators were instructed to use to document program activities. The tracking tool includes a roster of residents (the participant tracker) and a transaction-level accounting of program activities (the interaction tracker). The interaction tracker contains the date and type of an interaction between a resident and a navigator. Grantees were expected to use the tracking tool consistently, and HUD designed the tracker to utilize pre-specified categories to encourage data alignment (a list of the categories and definitions is provided in Appendix Section 7.2). Despite these efforts, there seemed to be a good deal of variation in how different grantees used the tracker. As such, any interpretation of cross-grantee comparisons should take this potential variation into account. In addition, while site visits were conducted at al nine grantee sites, one of the grantees in the non-experimental evaluation—Prichard Housing Authority in Alabama—did not provide HUD with usable participant or interaction tracker data. Therefore, the quantitative analysis of interactions discussed in Section 3.5 focuses on the remaining eight grantees.

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The analysis relies on merging the data in the participant tracker and the interaction tracker to data from the Public and Indian Housing Information Center (PIC) to obtain a limited set of demographic characteristics for each student listed in the tracker, including age, sex, race and ethnicity, citizenship status, household income, and the number of 15- to 20-year-olds in that student’s household.

To merge the data, we performed a fuzzy match on first name, last name, and date of birth (DOB). 14 There were three ways that a record from the interaction tracker and a record from PIC

could count as a match:

1. Match exactly on first name, match exactly on last name, and match exactly on DOB.

2. Fuzzy match on first and last name and match exactly on DOB.

3. Match exactly on both first name and last name and fuzzy match on DOB.

A perfect match was not expected because navigators may have interacted with youth who did not reside in the PHA or who resided there but were not included in the PIC data because they were outside the eligible age range (which was limited to 15- to 20-year-old residents) or were perhaps not included in the PIC data for other reasons (for example, not reported on the household roster). Exhibit 4 shows that the match rate differs among grantees, with rates above 95 percent for Milwaukee, Los Angeles, and Phoenix to rates of just under 80 percent for Philadelphia and Northwest Georgia.

14 In practice, matching was performed in R using fastLink (Enamorado, Fifield, and Imai, 2019) and a Jaro-Winkler string distance with a threshold equal to 0.9.

16

Exhibit 4: Match rate of individuals in the activity tracker and PIC. The match rate is defined as the percentage of students listed in the participant tracker who could be matched to the PIC residents file for each PHA. For shorthand in this figure and in remaining figures, the names of Los Angeles (LA), Northwest Georgia (NW GA), and Philadelphia (Philly) are abbreviated. PHAs in the experimental impact evaluation are noted with “(exp.)” below the PHA name.

3.4 Program development

Outside of the grant announcement, HUD gave few firm guidelines to grantees as to how to structure their programs. When SOAR launched, some PHAs decided to adopt existing models with minimal adaptation, such as Col ege Depot (Phoenix) and the Col ege Access Plan (Los Angeles). The benefits of relying on existing organizations included well-defined training systems and more fully-developed materials and structures, including dedicated space at the public library in the case of Col ege Depot, placement test boot camps, and other supports.

While the use of core program structures held certain advantages, grantees stil had to find ways to adapt the programs to the PHA context. For example, the Col ege Access Plan model was based on education navigators being placed on-site in high schools. Los Angeles had to make adjustments to base the program in public housing developments, which included having education navigators learn how to recruit individuals in the community.

When grantees did not build SOAR on an existing model, they often made use of referrals to institutions in the community such as the Boys and Girls Club, Catholic Community Services, YearUp, or other groups offering tutoring and other forms of academic preparation rather than trying to replicate the services in-house. Some education navigators focused on connecting young adults to other existing services offered by the grantee, such as resident services programs like FamilyWorks in Chicago and the chess program in High Point. Some grantees already offered college-related benefits, including tuition scholarships in Chicago and transportation assistance to incentivize col ege applications and enrol ment in Seattle.

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Leveraging existing grantee programs al owed navigators both to approach students at a location where they knew students would be and to use existing service referral systems.

In several instances, education navigators took it upon themselves to build partnerships when they did not formal y exist, such as by meeting with local school principals and college counselors to ensure SOAR students were receiving attention and support both at school and the PHA. Because high school counselors also were balancing large caseloads (estimated to be as many as 500 students per counselor in Chicago), education navigators recognized that schools may not provide al students with col ege information and indicated that, in some instances, counselors may even have steered SOAR students with poor grades away from col ege (Los Angeles).

3.5 Outreach and engagement

Navigators had a broad pool of age-eligible (15 to 20) students they were asked to assist. The characteristics of those whom navigators ended up assisting, which was a product of both navigators’ efforts to engage students and students’ wil ingness to meet with navigators, may have had implications for the effectiveness of the intervention. For instance, if navigators were spending the majority of their time meeting with youth who were reluctant to attend col ege, they may have needed to spend more time with each individual in order to get the desired outcome. On the other hand, navigators who spent the majority of their time meeting with youth who already had well-defined plans for going to college may have been supporting students who needed less intensive help (and may have been successful without any help from the navigators). Education navigators pursued a variety of strategies for interacting with potential participants by trial and error in an attempt to address the specific community context and personal needs of each student.

Variation in the types of interactions

Many interviewees agreed that navigators needed to engage the whole family, not just the student. Grantees interviewed described one of the more common strategies in larger developments as the “knock and talk”—visiting residents (sometimes unscheduled on a weekend) at their homes so that education navigators could make a personal connection with both the student and parent(s). Buildings with open access made this approach easier. Other geographic and physical features made this approach more difficult. Scattered-site housing designs in Phoenix and the scale of developments in Los Angeles made it harder for one navigator to reach enough students efficiently, and education navigators in Chicago had trouble reaching residents in mixed-income housing where they needed to be buzzed in by a resident.

Though the navigators we interviewed thought door-to-door interactions were the most effective way to engage students, grantees supplemented door knocking with other types of outreach, which commonly included newsletters, mass postal mailings, emails, and posters.

Grantees (and navigators in particular) did not think these efforts were as effective as door-to-18

door outreach, but they thought they were helpful for raising the overall visibility of the program.

These impressions are supported by the interaction tracker data. As seen in Exhibit 5, which examines the total number of times each mode of interaction was used, the three most common strategies reported were mailing literature, emailing, and in-person, one-on-one counseling. The same general results hold when looking at the total number of students exposed to each strategy. Exhibit 6 shows the same three activities as the most popular, but more students were exposed to interactions classified as one-on-one counseling than any other strategy.

Exhibit 5: Total number of interactions by type. In these counts, the unit of analysis is the interaction. If the same student met with a navigator for four separate one-on-one counseling sessions, it appears in the count four times. The figure shows that while low-cost outreach methods such as mailing literature and emails comprised the majority of interactions, interactions classified as one-on-one counseling were also frequently reported.

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Exhibit 6: Number of residents exposed to each type of interaction. In these counts, if a student receives multiple “doses” of the same type of interaction—for example, four in-person meetings—she only appears in the count once. The counts are summed across al grantees.

Within these general patterns of engagement, there was significant variation among grantees in the methods navigators reported using. Exhibit 7 shows the proportion of engaged students who were exposed to each mode of interaction. In general, non-experimental grantees more frequently used communications like postal mail, email, phone calls, and texting. While it is speculation, it is possible that this is a reflection of grantee capacity. For example, nonexperimental grantees—with the exception of Phoenix—had a single education navigator and may have felt these methods of communication were a more effective use of scarce navigator time, especial y when the navigator was responsible for the whole of the PHA’s geographic area instead of having a smal er grouping of assigned buildings.

20

Exhibit 7: Interaction mode by grantee. The denominator in each proportion is the number of students within that PHA who had any interaction with the navigator. The numerator in each proportion is the number of students with at least one interaction fal ing into that category.

The variation in the mode of interaction that Exhibit 7 depicts is also a result of variation in how navigators used the interaction tracker (Appendix Section 7.2 shows the definitions of categories that HUD provided to grantees, such as a one-on-one counseling meeting). For instance, examining navigators’ free text notes shows that one-on-one counseling encompassed a wider range of activities than sit-down meetings to focus on specific tasks. Exhibit 8 displays a random sample of nine text descriptions of one-on-one counseling. Approximately half of such interactions seem to describe knock and talks. Analysis of al the navigators’ free text notes shows variation across grantees in the most frequent words used for interactions marked as one-on-one counseling. 15 For instance, Exhibit 7 shows that Philadelphia reported that over 75

percent of engaged students had a one-on-one counseling session. But navigators there were much more likely to have the word “door” in their notes on counseling sessions than in Seattle or Chicago. This highlights how between-grantee variation in reported engagement likely reflects a mix of different strategies and different data recording practices.

Exhibit 8: Random selection of one-on-one counseling text descriptions

Sat with the student and developed a work plan for applying for scholarships

Door to door

15 See Appendix Section 7.2 Exhibits 37 and 38.

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Door-to-door visits for project soar to introduce myself and the program services

FAFSA

Door-to-door visits for Project SOAR at Legends South to introduce myself and the services available. Was not home. Spoke to grandmother.

Introduction

Interns provided flyer for upcoming soar field trip

Met with [name] to advise her on how to enrol in the Partners in Education program for the summer session. Gave her the new Chicago Housing Authority scholarship information as well.

Resource fair invites

Timing of engagement

Over time, grantees modified their approaches in an attempt to gain more traction in the community. By the summer of 2018, education navigators in Philadelphia had begun to write personalized messages on the outside of materials they were leaving behind when residents did not answer the door. Communications campaigns also served as a way to communicate success stories or fun events that could encourage interest. Education navigators in Phoenix and Milwaukee found that residents were most likely to read communications when included in rent mailers. Some education navigators began going to other well-attended (non-SOAR) community events as part of their recruitment strategy (as in High Point), while others recognized the importance of working with resident councils to get more buy-in from the community (as in Philadelphia).

Overal , the intensity of interactions seemed to pick up in the summer of 2018. Exhibit 9 shows the number of students engaging with in-person interactions over time. There appears to be a gradual ramp up in activity over the fal of 2017, when navigators were perhaps trying to make initial inroads in the communities. Then there was a sizable increase in activity over the summer of 2018 before activity again faded heading into the fal of 2018.

There are several possible explanations for the increase in activity. First, as several grantees noted, it took time to develop relationships in the community; going into the second year of the SOAR grant, navigators had more ongoing relationships with students and their families. Also, the summer may have given students more time to meet with navigators without the pressure of balancing school, homework, and other family responsibilities. One thing that may temper these explanations is that a grantee convening took place in June, and there was a push by HUD

for sites to submit data to inform some of the presentations. It is possible that some of the spike in activity was more related to variation in data quality than a reflection of on-the-ground interactions. The data seem to support the idea that grantees and navigators needed a good amount of time to achieve more robust operations. Even a full year may not have been enough time to achieve steady-state operations. For example, the CEO of one grantee thought that the 2-year timeline for the project was too short to see real change and develop trust with residents.

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Based in part on the site visits, a decision was made to concentrate on the second year of the grant for the main specifications of the analysis. Concentrating on outcomes related to the first year of the grant would not be a test of a fully functioning program. Navigators were spending more time trying to engage students than helping them with concrete tasks during a good portion of the 2018–2019 FAFSA season. The peak in activity in the summer of 2018 suggests that navigators were in a much better position to help students with tasks related to the 2019–

2020 FAFSA season and that the analysis would be more likely to detect program effects by focusing on outcomes related to the 2019–2020 school year.

Exhibit 9: Frequency of in-person interactions over time

Outreach challenges

Navigators encountered resistance to participation in a number of ways. First, residents were reluctant to engage with new services that they thought could soon disappear, which they had experienced before. Second, nearby schools often had limited resources and poor academic preparation for young adults living in public housing, making the col ege application process seem even more daunting. Behavioral issues in school, including experiences with trauma, were prevalent among the population. Third, some students were parents themselves, which made it difficult for them to balance school with childcare (both because of cost and balancing schedules), and many did not think postsecondary education was a possibility and were not aware of childcare supports that were potential y available. Final y, in several communities, immigration/citizenship status presented a barrier. Undocumented students could face 23

additional bureaucratic hurdles or have to fil out additional information, which made the process more complicated. Undocumented students in some cases were not eligible for as many programs, scholarships, or other types of financial aid, and they could be reluctant to provide information if they feared that it would be used for an immigration enforcement action. Al of these things contributed to reluctance among students to participate in a program focused on postsecondary education.

The struggles in recruitment are apparent in the activity tracker data. Exhibit 10 shows the proportion of eligible residents who had at least one in-person interaction with a navigator.

Navigators in only two grantees met with at least 40 percent of eligible students in person, and in most grantees, navigators met with fewer than 20 percent of eligible residents in person. This does not necessarily indicate that grantees were completely unsuccessful. It is difficult to define what a “good” level of interaction is, given that different grantees may have decided to focus on more intensive interactions with a smal er set of individuals, and the numbers may reflect different strategic decisions. Stil , given what grantee staff reported, combined with the administrative data, it seems like outreach was one area where grantees tended to struggle.

The level of engagement has implications for the analysis. Whether or not grantees were achieving the right balance for caseloads according to their program model, the primary specification for analysis estimates effect of the intent to treat or the effect of the program on al eligible students, regardless of whether the students heard from or met with a navigator.

Relatively low engagement rates could lead to underestimating the program’s effect on those who were engaged. As discussed in Section 5.1, a secondary analysis estimates the effect of the program on those who have at least one in-person interaction with a navigator to account for low levels of engagement.

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Exhibit 10: Proportion of eligible residents with at least one in-person interaction. The denominator is either: (1) all students aged 15–20 in the non-experimental PHAs, or (2) students aged 15–20 residing in treatment AMPs in the experimental PHAs.

Demographic characteristics of engagement

Descriptive tests reveal that certain demographic characteristics were associated with a higher (or lower) likelihood of a student having any in-person interactions with a navigator. Exhibit 11

shows the results from a model that separately regresses the binary indicator of any in-person meeting on each student demographic characteristic. 16 The results show that, overal , navigators were more likely to meet with female residents, more likely to meet with students at the older end of the 15 to 20 age range, and less likely to meet with students in larger households or who identified as Hispanic and non-White (relative to non-Hispanic White). However, as Exhibit 10

shows, these overal relationships may just be highlighting the between-grantee variation in rates of in-person engagement; for instance, Los Angeles has both a higher concentration of Hispanic residents and a much lower in-person engagement rate.

Exhibit 12 shows the results when analyzing variation within each grantee by including a grantee fixed effect. Although most relationships remain the same, the analysis shows, for instance, that within grantees that have a mix of citizens and non-citizens, non-citizen students are more likely to meet in person with a navigator.

16 Because the analysis is meant to be descriptive rather than causal, and because attributes such as a student’s race/ethnicity are correlated with household income, we ran separate regressions for each type of attribute: citizenship, race/ethnicity, household income, and total household members 15–20.

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Exhibit 11: Demographic predictors of engagement: overall

Exhibit 12: Demographic predictors of engagement: variation within each PHA 3.6 Clusters of variation

The variation in engagement shows two interesting patterns. First, navigators were meeting with female students who already have higher odds of attending col ege (Clark and Shi, 2020). These students may have required less help from navigators. For example, they may already have had a general plan and may have only needed help with smal er steps as part of that larger plan.

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Second, navigators were meeting with students who may have faced unique and complex barriers to col ege, such as non-citizens who had to navigate eligibility rules. For these students, navigators may have needed to provide more-intensive or more-individualized assistance.

Grantees varied not only in terms of engagement when it is defined as a binary measure of whether or not a student met with a navigator at least once in person, but also in terms of engagement as defined as the complete set of interactions navigators and students had.

Students with at least one in-person meeting varied along two additional dimensions of engagement: the “dose” of meetings (with some students having long trajectories of repeated meetings with navigators and others having only one meeting) and the presence of the student’s parents at that meeting. 17

Analysis examining these other dimensions clustered students’ interaction trajectories—their full history of interactions across the entire period—using sequence analysis.18 We defined seven

“states” that a student could be in during a particular month of the study window:19

1. No meeting between student and navigator.

2. Navigator met with parent only.

3. Navigator met with student only.

4. Navigator met with parent and student together.

5. Navigator met with school official only.

6. Navigator met with school official and student and/or parent.

7. Other in-person meeting.

Each student’s sequence is structured as an ordered set of interactions, and an optimal matching algorithm and k-means clustering groups together students with similar sequences of navigator interactions.20 Exhibit 13 shows five distinct clusters of interaction histories identified in the analysis. The clusters show that the binary measure of any meeting or no meetings hides significant variation in the types of and time sequencing of meetings.

The five clusters can be further grouped into two broad types: students whose parents co-attended the meetings with navigators (Clusters 1 and 4) and students whose parents rarely attended (Clusters 2 and 3). A regression analysis shows that households with higher total household income and fewer teenagers aged 15 to 20 were more likely to fal into the “heavier parent involvement” cluster, with Philadelphia and Seattle also having more parent involvement in meetings than Chicago and LA. Engagement varies considerably across grantees and is accompanied by significant heterogeneity in the type and sequencing of in-person meetings.

17 As shown in Section 7.2, the interaction tracker category was broader than the student’s biological or legal parent, defining parent/guardian as “A primary caregiver for FAFSA eligible AMP resident.” For shorthand, we use the phrase

“parent,” but the results should be interpreted as the involvement of the student’s primary caregiver.

18 We use traminer in R for the analysis.

19 For students with multiple states in the same month, we use the first meeting of that month; this was rare enough that we do not believe a different decision—such as using the last meeting of the month—would alter findings.

20 Exhibit 39 in the Appendix shows an example with twenty randomly-chosen students.

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Given this heterogeneity, it is possible to define engagement in numerous ways, and estimates of the effect of the program on those who were treated may be sensitive to decisions about how engagement is defined.

Exhibit 13: Clustering interaction sequences among students with at least one in-person meeting.

K-means clustering with k = 5 shows five distinct clusters of interaction trajectories. Cluster 1 is characterized by a high prevalence of the navigator jointly meeting with the student and his or her parent.

Cluster 4 represents a similar focus on joint meetings but with fewer meetings overal . Clusters 2 and 3 are characterized by a high prevalence of student-only meetings, with Cluster 2 having these more spread out over the study period and Cluster 3 having a peak in summer of 2018. Finally, Cluster 5 is characterized by many months of no in-person meetings.

4 Impact analysis

The impact analysis of the effectiveness of Project SOAR includes two distinct parts: an experimental analysis of four grantees and a non-experimental analysis of the other five 28

grantees. 21 Four of the grantees—Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Seattle—had particularly high youth-to-navigator ratios to the extent that it was impractical to have the navigators attempt to serve everyone. As a feature of the grant, these four PHAs were chosen to have navigators offer assistance only to a group of randomly selected youth (the treatment group). The remaining youth were not eligible for SOAR services (the control group). These four PHAs comprise the experimental component of the impact evaluation. This analysis compares the postsecondary outcomes of the youth selected for the treatment group with outcomes of the youth selected for the control group in those four PHAs.

The other five grantees were not included in the experimental evaluation for various reasons; they were included in the non-experimental impact evaluation. Three of the five PHAs not included in the experimental evaluation had a smaller relative number of eligible youth (High Point, Northwest Georgia, and Prichard). HUD chose not to ration or restrict navigator assistance in these PHAs to a subset of eligible individuals because it was not anticipated that there would be excess demand (for example, caseloads were small enough that it was expected that navigators could attempt to engage with al eligible students22), and these PHAs were excluded from the experimental component of the impact evaluation. One PHA (Milwaukee) had similar youth-to-navigator ratios as the experimental PHAs but declined to participate in the randomized evaluation. Another PHA (Phoenix) had a configuration of buildings that made random assignment less feasible. 23 In each of the five PHAs participating in the non-experimental component, navigators attempted to provide assistance to all residents in the targeted age range. The analysis of these five grantees uses quasi-experimental methods to estimate the impact of Project SOAR by comparing the postsecondary outcomes of youth in these five PHAs to youth in (similar) PHAs that were not selected for the grant.

4.1 Data and data structure

There are several sources of data which inform the impact analyses. 24

The Public and Indian Housing Information Center (PIC): PIC is a HUD system developed to col ect and maintain certified tenant and other data for processing from Public Housing Agencies. The PIC data extracts are point-in-time quarterly extracts created by HUD for research, reporting, and monitoring purposes.

21 All of these choices were preregistered in an analysis plan, posted at this link on the OES website on February 12, 2020.

The analysis plan upload date can be verified at this link. The analytic choices were made prior to us taking any outcome data into possession. Deviations from the analysis plan are noted in Section 4.6.

22 Although this assumption may have been incorrect in retrospect.

23 Phoenix had only four AMPs (described below) eligible for assignment, two of which were very large and two of which were smal , making it likely that al would be selected to the treatment group given the random al ocation mechanism.

24 The analysis plan included some exploratory analysis based on records from one local high school district; however, these data ultimately were not available.

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• What these data help us investigate: PIC contains the identifiers used for matching to outcome data held by the Department of Education (described below). PIC also contains basic demographic information for individuals and households, including age, race, ethnicity, household income, and household size. These data al ow us to control for baseline demographic characteristics of the public housing residents that remained imbalanced following randomization.

• Limitations: The data are limited to information collected for the purposes of verifying eligibility for housing assistance. As such, it lacks residents’ grades, test scores, or other academic outcomes relevant for col ege going.

• Analyses: Experimental.

Picture of Subsidized Households (PSH): The PSH is a publicly-available data source containing demographic characteristics of those residing in subsidized housing. The analysis restricts the data to the Public Housing program.

• What these data help us investigate: While PIC data inform (1) the main experimental results focused on five grantees and (2) the analysis of demographic variation in interactions across al grantees, the non-experimental analysis involves comparing the five non-experimental grantees to al other PHAs not receiving a SOAR grant. The scale of a customized extract of these data—over 2,000 PHAs observed over a period of 13

years—led us to use the publicly-available PSH data to col ect resident demographics for these donor PHAs.25

• Limitations: While PIC data are individual-level and restricted to age-eligible residents, the PSH data are aggregated to the PHA and contain demographics of al PHA residents.

Depending on the similarity between (1) the demographics of the entire PHA and (2) the demographics of PHA residents aged 15 to 20, the former is only a general

approximation for the latter.

• Analyses: Non-experimental.

Enterprise Data Warehouse and Analytics (EDWA): EDWA is a data warehouse maintained by the Department of Education that contains information on students’ interactions with the federal postsecondary educational system. EDWA contains information on FAFSA completion, postsecondary enrol ment, and federal student aid. A memorandum of understanding between HUD and ED allowed for HUD to send person-level files to ED to be matched to EDWA using individuals’ Social Security numbers, names, and dates of birth. ED provided the AMP- and PHA-level aggregated outcome data used in the main analysis and conducted the individual-level complier analysis on individual-level data.

• What these data help us investigate: These data include the main outcomes of the study.

They were used to estimate if there were any changes in FAFSA completion or other postsecondary outcomes for students eligible for SOAR services.

25 For comparability, we also use the demographics from PSH for the grantees in the synthetic control analyses.

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• Limitations: Navigators served residents during two FAFSA completion cycles (Exhibit 3).

One began shortly after navigators were hired (October 1, 2017), ending June 30, 2019.

The other began when navigators were about a year into their tenure, starting October 1, 2018 and ending June 30, 2020. As Exhibit 3 highlights, due to the timing of our analysis, we only observe FAFSA completion through March 2020, which truncates the full 2019–

2020 FAFSA cycle.

• Analyses: Experimental; Non-experimental.

College type: In addition to affecting whether students enrol in col ege, the intervention might also impact the type of col ege at which students enrol . Navigators were instructed to work with students to find a col ege in line with their preferences and constraints, constraints that might include family obligations (that mean students prioritize commuter schools) or financial obligations (that mean students prioritize shorter degree programs). Following prior work (Chetty et al. , 2017; Deming et al. , 2015), we grouped col eges into four tiers of selectivity:26

1. Highly selective or selective col eges (Tier I in results presentation): these encompass tiers 1 through 6 in the Barron’s rating system, or about 1,200 col eges.

2. Non-selective 4-year col eges (Tier II in results presentation): tiers 7 and 8.

3. Non-selective 2-year public and not-for-profit col eges (Tier III in results presentation): tier 9.

4. Non-selective private, for-profit colleges, 2 or 4-year (Tier IV in results presentation): tiers 10 and 11.

• What these data help us investigate: If there are general increases in postsecondary enrol ment, these data can help determine what types of schools the enrol ment increases are concentrated in.

• Limitations: Col ege enrol ment is a function of (1) which col eges a student applies to, (2) which col eges accept the student’s application (if applicable), and (3) which col ege a student chooses to enrol in. By observing enrol ment, we miss possible impacts on outcomes such as the breadth of col eges to which a student applies.

• Analyses: Experimental, Quasi-experimental.

4.2 Outcome variables to be analyzed

The primary outcome of interest is FAFSA completion for the 2019–2020 academic year. The FAFSA cycle for the 2019–2020 academic year begins October 1, 2018, and ends June 30, 2020.

Exhibit 3 shows the relationship between academic cycles and the timeline for navigator services. The impact analysis restricts the analytic sample to the population of students who are expected to be high school seniors or older, a group for whom FAFSA completion is more relevant.

26 We begin with the same 12 original tiers in the Barron’s system as past studies but group these tiers differently to ensure adequate cell sizes in each tier.

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Exhibit 14 illustrates the “effective window” for FAFSA completion in the two focal cycles for the experimental analysis. The effective window is defined based on school registration rules around student age. In particular, most school districts in the study require a student to be 5 years old on or around September 1 of the year in which they enter kindergarten. The effective window uses this rule to define rising high school seniors as those who turn 17 as of September 1 of the relevant outcome year. Al students who are between 17 and 20 years old at some point during the effective window are age-eligible for that cycle. If the student meets the age eligibility requirement and lives in an area eligible to receive SOAR assistance at some point during the effective window, he or she is included in the analytic sample for that year.27

Exhibit 14: Time windows for each FAFSA cycle

Cycle

Actual window

Effective window

Primary: FAFSA 2019–2020

10/01/2018–06/30/2020

09/01/2019–08/31/2020

Secondary: FAFSA 2018–2019

10/01/2017–06/30/2019

09/01/2018–08/31/2019

Secondary outcomes include rates of postsecondary enrol ment, institution type (public, private, or proprietary), program length (2-year or 4-year), program selectivity, and Pell Grant receipt.

The analysis only explores these outcomes for the 2019–2020 school year, when it is more likely SOAR has an effect.

4.3 Experimental impact analysis

This section describes the statistical models and hypothesis tests for the experimental impact analysis.

Random assignment process

The experimental design uses an administrative unit cal ed the Asset Management Project (AMP). General y speaking, AMPs are individual buildings or groups of buildings in close proximity.

The decision to use AMPs as the unit of randomization was based on two main considerations.

First, randomly assigning individuals (including within buildings) would be logistically chal enging for navigators. Individual random assignment would not only make it more difficult to verify eligibility, it would make it much more time consuming for navigators to reach eligible individuals. For example, a navigator may have to recruit and assist individuals in different developments over a large geographic area. Even with the presence of multiple navigators, the area any one navigator would have to cover would mean a substantial amount of time would be devoted to travel rather than direct assistance. Assigning AMPs guaranteed that navigators would have more limited geographic areas in which they would need to operate. Second, using 27 Note that this means a resident may only be eligible for SOAR for a short period of time, but this decision reflects the fact that navigators could help anyone eligible for any length of time. For the non-experimental analysis, the logic is similar but extended back to start with the 2007–2008 FAFSA cycle. Appendix 7, Exhibit 40 shows in more detail the eligibility algorithm.

32

AMPs as the unit of randomization was expected to minimize crossovers, which is defined as individuals assigned to the control group receiving assistance from navigators. It was anticipated that it would be more difficult for navigators to both verify eligibility and to turn individuals in the control group away if individual-level random assignment was used. For example, it would be difficult to build an on-site presence in a development while having to explain that only certain residents were eligible for SOAR. As described below, this was stil a concern when using AMPs as the unit of randomization, due to the close physical proximity of different buildings in some cases.

While the choice to use AMPs as the unit of random assignment made program implementation easier, it also limited the statistical power of the experiment. Relative to the number of eligible individuals, there were a smal number of AMPs. This limitation is discussed more in Section 6.

Office of Evaluation Sciences relied heavily on local PHA knowledge to select AMPs for the experiment that would have clear geographic, and sometimes social, boundaries. In a majority of cases, individual AMPs were treated as unique randomization units; however, some AMPs were grouped together to avoid confusion and limit possible non-compliance because of unclear boundaries. Additional y, each PHA provided HUD with a list of AMPs they requested be removed from consideration for various reasons—for example, due to geography that would make travel difficult for education navigators, overlap with other similar resident service programs (such as Jobs Plus), or because of other local knowledge. After groupings and exclusions, a total of 78 AMPs were eligible for random assignment.28

The left panel of Exhibit 15, uses the Chicago Housing Authority as an example of how AMPs were randomized. The figure aggregates households to the AMP level and shows AMPs randomized to treatment (orange) or control (gray). It shows that AMPs can be located in similar neighborhoods and randomized to different conditions, which ideal y prevents confounding between treatment status and characteristics like the quality of neighborhood schools. The right panel of the exhibit zooms in on one Chicago neighborhood, Bronzevil e, and three AMPs, with each dot representing a household and its treatment status. It shows that there can be households in distinct AMPs that are located in similar neighborhoods and also shows that AMPs vary in how geographical y clustered or distributed their units are.

28 In the discussions that fol ow, we use the term “AMP” to refer to these 78 AMPs, even though some are technical y

“modified AMPs,” or AMPs grouped together for the purpose of randomization.

33

Exhibit 15: Map of AMP randomizations in Chicago. The left panel illustrates randomization at the AMP

level. AMPs are placed at the mean latitude and longitude of units. The sizes of the dots are scaled to the number of age-eligible youth in each AMP. The right panel zooms in on three AMPs. The map shows how the randomization helped minimize potential spillovers while still resulting in neighborhoods with both treatment and control group students due to the clustering of different AMPs in the same neighborhood.

Navigators were instructed to treat as many age-eligible youth within the treatment AMP as they were able to and were instructed not to serve anyone from control AMPs. In practice, navigators were given rosters of youth living in treatment AMPs with which they could verify the eligibility of youth. If students who did not reside in a treatment AMP attempted to engage, navigators were asked to give them a list of other community resources or to refer them to other PHA staff for assistance, but navigators were instructed not to provide any personalized assistance. 29

The fol owing randomization procedure was used to determine which AMPs would be treated, with code for the procedure provided in Appendix Section 7.4:

1. For each PHA, AMPs that were too large or too smal were removed from consideration.

AMPs with fewer than 10 age-eligible individuals were removed. AMPs with more age-eligible youth than a single navigator could support were also removed.

2. AMPs were sorted by a random number, with the first AMP in the sorted list assigned to treatment.

3. Subsequent AMPs were assigned to treatment by progressing down the randomly sorted list until the final AMP assigned to treatment exceeded the maximum workload.

4. Al remaining AMPs were assigned to control.

29 It is possible at group events for youth from control AMPs to be present because navigators typically did not find it feasible to check participants against the rosters given the format.

34

Statistical models

The primary model estimates the intent to treat effect by applying OLS to a regression of the outcome of interest ( ya) on an indicator for treatment ( Ta), where a indexes the modified AMPs used as the unit of randomization. The main specification also controls for two blocking variables ( X): a dummy indicator for each grantee and a continuous measure of the number of age-eligible youth at the time of randomization. Additional y, because the assignment mechanism results in larger AMPs having slightly higher probabilities of being selected for the treatment group, the model uses inverse probability weights to account for the estimated probability of selection into the treatment and control groups. 30 Finally, all models use the Lin estimator (Lin et al. , 2013), which entails:

1. Mean centering each covariate, which we wil refer to as X˜: X˜ = Xi − X¯

2. For each model that includes covariates, regressing the outcome on the treatment, mean-centered covariates, and interaction between the two.

More formally, the analysis estimates the following linear model:

ya = β 0 + β 1 Ta + γX˜ a + δTaX˜ a + ϵa (1)

Each outcome of interest is computed as a proportion, with the (1) numerator being the count of students who completed the FAFSA for the 2019–2020 school year and (2) the denominator being the students defined by the eligibility criteria outlined in Section 4.2.

The estimate of interest is β 1, which is the estimated effect of the intervention on AMPs randomized to treatment.

A second model includes AMP-level baseline characteristics as covariates. 31 As discussed in more detail in Appendix Section 7.6, there were differences between the AMPs randomly selected to be treated and those selected for the control group. In particular, AMPs with a higher proportion of Black residents and AMPs with higher household income were more likely to be selected into the treatment group in Seattle, and AMPs with a higher proportion of non-citizens were more likely to be selected into the treatment group in Los Angeles. These imbalances likely stem from the fact that there were a smal number of AMPs in each PHA, and buildings tend to have fairly homogeneous populations. Although underlying characteristics of AMPs would expect to balance out in a large enough sample, this sample was too smal to achieve perfect balance. Using covariates can bring the sample back into mechanical balance, but it also can create unstable results given the smal sample issues.

30 Probabilities were estimated via simulating the randomization process m = 1000 times. The weights used take the simulated probability of selection to treatment for each AMP and calculate the inverse probability weight as 1

, where T is an indicator variable for being assigned to the treatment in actuality and p is the (𝑇𝑇 ∗ 𝑝𝑝 + (1 − 𝑇𝑇 ) ∗ (1 − 𝑝𝑝))

estimated probability of selection into treatment.

31 Since PIC is updated quarterly, the characteristics were taken from the PIC file from the quarter preceding May 2017, so al covariates were measured at baseline.

35

The adjusted model includes covariates that are likely correlated with the col ege-going behavior of youth in that AMP and/or the households’ openness to navigator help:32

• Percentage of households that self-report Black, non-Hispanic (White held out as reference category).

• Percentage of households that self-report non-Black, Hispanic.

• Percentage of households that self-report other race, Non-Hispanic.

• Percentage of households that contain non-citizens. 33

• Mean total annual household income.

Similar to the main specification, a secondary specification uses the Lin estimator with mean-centered versions of the covariates. In the model, Z denotes the combined matrix of (1) AMP-level covariates, and (2) the blocking variables included in the above specification.

ya = β 0 + β 1 Ta + γZ˜ a + δTaZ˜ a + ϵa (2)

The first two models examine the effect of an AMP being randomized and analyze the impact using the outcomes of al students in the AMP—or the intent to treat estimand. Section 3.5

shows, however, that rather than engaging al students, navigators met with fewer than half of eligible youth in treatment AMPs. As a result, there is a good amount of non-compliance: the presence of a navigator in an AMP increased the likelihood that a youth engaged with that navigator, but a sizeable fraction of youth in treatment AMPs never engaged. Similarly, there was at least some non-compliance in the form of control students receiving navigator help. 34

As a result, a third specification estimates the effect of SOAR on engaged students—the complier average causal effect. Engagement is defined as at least one in-person meeting between a navigator and the student. This analysis uses individual rather than AMP-level data, with individuals now indexed by i. The analysis estimates the fol owing two-stage model: 1. A model predicting whether or not a youth engages with the navigator as a function of that youth’s treatment status and baseline covariates (Z) measured at the youth level:35

engage i = β 0 + β 1 Ti + δZi + ϵi 32 For instance, mixed citizenship families may face greater confusion about eligibility for aid.

33 This includes both “eligible non-citizens”—non-citizens who are eligible to live in public housing—and “ineligible non- citizens”—non-citizens who are not eligible for housing assistance.

34 Unfortunately, navigators may have only recorded interactions with treatment group youth and not the interactions with control group youth, which means we are able to measure compliance in the form of those assigned to treatment not receiving treatment but are less confident that we observe compliance in the form of those assigned to control receiving treatment.

35 We used the following covariates drawn from PIC that were correlated with navigator engagement/outcomes, and that remained imbalanced between groups: gender, race/ethnicity (Black, Non-Hispanic; Hispanic; or other), total annual household income, total household members, PHA dummy.

36

2. A model using the predictions from stage one to estimate the Treatment on Treated effect, or the estimated effect among the youth whom the navigator engages.

yi = β 0 + β 1engâge i + ϵi

Due to data limitations, the outcome variable in this first model likely had systematic measurement error—for instance, if navigators consistently underreport engagement, the data wil undercount the number of youth served, and the estimate wil potential y overestimate the treatment effect.

Inference criteria, including any adjustments for multiple comparisons

The decision rule was based on p-values and confidence intervals generated using a permutation approach that uses the randomization procedure described above, with any two-tailed p-value less than 0.05 considered statistical y significant (for example, randomization inference, or RI). The analysis studying FAFSA completion and using the p-values from RI is considered confirmatory. Exhibit 16 outlines the calculation for p-values from a long-form data frame where there is:

• An observed treatment effect.

• Treatment effects from m = 1, 000 permutations.

Exhibit 16: Code snippet for randomization inference p values

ri_p_df = perm_obj %>% filter(model == model_string & outcome_var ==

outcome_name) %>%

summarise(ri_p = mean(abs(permuted_coefs) > abs(obs_tx_coef))) A separate analysis of FAFSA completion that uses p-values from linear regression and heteroskedastic-consistent standard errors rather than randomization inference serves as a robustness check on the RI-based inference, with the caveat that the smal number of AMPs makes assumptions behind those p-values less credible. 36

In addition to the primary outcome—FAFSA completion during the 2019–2020 cycle—we also pre-registered and examined the fol owing secondary outcomes: FAFSA completion during the 2018–2019 cycle, col ege enrol ment by selectivity/type, and receipt of a Pell Grant, al for the 2019–2020 school year only.

4.4 Non-experimental impact analysis

The non-experimental analysis of Project SOAR is intended to add to the overall description of programmatic effects but is considered exploratory given the stronger assumptions the method requires.

36 We used the HC2 specification to estimate standard errors, which has a smal sample correction; however, the p-values from the randomization inference procedure generate exact p-values that rely on fewer sample assumptions.

37

The effect of Project SOAR in the nonexperimental PHAs is estimated using a synthetic control method. The basic intuition behind the synthetic control method is to create a relevant comparison unit for a treated unit by using the data to create a weighted composite of other units in a donor group. The method was first introduced by Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003) and has become increasingly popular in recent years, with several authors suggesting extensions of the basic intuition. This analysis uses the more recent three-step process as described in Xu’s generalized synthetic control method, implemented using gsynth in R (Xu 2017): 1. Model latent “factors” of outcomes using only the (untreated) donor pool and both pre-and post-treatment data.

2. Use the results from Step (1) to find the factor loading for each treatment unit.

3. Use those factor loadings to predict the counterfactual outcomes for the treated unit(s) in the post-treatment period(s).

4. Compare the treated unit(s) counterfactual values in the post-treatment year(s) to its observed values.

The result is an average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) for each year. For the FAFSA outcomes, 11 of the 13 years (the 2007–2008 to 2017–2018 FAFSA cycles) we consider pre-treatment; 2 of the 13 years (the 2018–2019 and 2019–2020 FAFSA cycles) we consider post-treatment. For the col ege enrol ment outcomes, we consider 11 years pre-treatment (what we call the 2008–2009 to 2018–2019 col ege cycles) and 1 year (2019–2020) post-treatment.

Donor pool

The donor pool was initial y made up of al PHAs with the exception of the non-experimental PHAs and the four experimental PHAs. As Section 7.10 describes in greater detail, the Department of Education’s redaction of small cell sizes—cases where fewer than ten age-eligible students in a PHA completed the FAFSA in a given year—meant that a significant proportion of the PHAs had some years of the outcome data redacted. This means that the effective donor pool is restricted to PHAs that were similar in size to the non-experimental grantees. While these PHAs are only a smal proportion of PHAs overal , Exhibit 17 shows that they house the majority of public housing residents.

Exhibit 17: Number of PHAs and residents in donor pool for synthetic control analysis N residents (2016; all ages)

Status

N PHAs

possible donor residents

% of

In donor pool (main specification) 1,137

1,791,548

88%

Excluded from donor pool

1,804

244,497

12%

Treatment

5

16,150

–

Inference criteria, including any adjustments for multiple comparisons

38

The non-experimental analysis uses the parametric bootstrapping implemented in gsynth for inference. Broadly, the procedure holds out one control unit to be treated as a fake “treatment”

unit and uses the remaining control units to re-estimate the procedure and predict outcomes for the left-out unit. Uncertainty estimates are then based on differences between the predicted outcomes for that held-out control unit and its observed outcome, repeated for al control units.

As with the main analysis, we use p < 0.05 as the threshold for statistical significance.

4.5 Preferred specification

As pre-specified, the main confirmatory specification is the intent-to-treat effect of the program on FAFSA completion during the 2019–2020 cycle, control ing only for a PHA dummy and the number of youth in the AMP at the time of randomization.

We prefer the ITT effect over the complier analysis because it more closely approximates the relevant policy question: what happens if PHAs implement Project SOAR? In other words, the ITT

estimand assumes that in the course of normal program operations, some students wil choose not to engage with navigators, but that decisions about program efficacy are made taking some level of non-compliance as a given. An ITT analysis cannot say whether or not the program model being tested resembles the policy ideal closely enough. For example, the ITT impact analysis does not assess whether or not there was adequate staffing or if grantees were given enough time to develop sufficiently mature programs to engage with the expected number of individuals.

The complier analysis of the effect on students who met with a navigator at least once only addresses the effectiveness of SOAR conditional on being engaged with a navigator. This estimate may help provide some idea as to what a maximum effect could be, but the estimand is comparing only the types students who are interested enough or motivated enough to engage with navigators and is not representative of the eligible population as a whole. As such, we use it to provide more context to the ITT analysis but treat it as a secondary, exploratory outcome.

Second, the focus on FAFSA completion during the 2019–2020 cycle allows for a test of more mature program operations.

Final y, the more parsimonious set of controls helps us mitigate issues in the AMP-level analysis of unstable treatment effect estimates that stem from common support issues—for instance, AMPs within a PHA having very low percentages of “Other race/ethnicity” or non-citizen residents. These issues can also lead to unstable weights in the complex weighting procedure, which involves randomly re-assigning AMPs to the treatment group to reweight the data by the inverse probability of treatment.

39

4.6 Deviations from the analysis plan

There were no major deviations from the analysis plan. However, the analysis did deviate in the following ways, largely due to data availability or time constraints:

1. The analysis plan discussed using data from Seattle Public Schools (SPS) to examine academic characteristics of the students that navigators engage rather than just the demographic characteristics in PIC. The SPS data on student academic characteristics were not available, so the analysis of variation in navigator engagement is restricted to the demographic characteristics available in PIC.

2. Model 2 uses a slightly different set of covariates than specified due to data availability. The analysis plan prespecified using the fol owing three covariates which were not available for the analysis:

• Average highest grade of education completed by household head.

• Percentage of household heads employed full-time.

• Percentage of families homeless at time of admission to the housing program.

3. The synthetic control analysis does not use PHA-level covariates. The implementation of the generalized synthetic control method in gsynth did not reliably allow us to adjust for covariates. 37 Therefore, we restrict the role of PHA-level covariates to comparing the demographic composition of the treatment PHAs to the composition of PHAs who were in the donor pool due to a large-enough amount of non-redacted outcomes data.

4. We did not test the robustness of synthetic control results to methods other than the generalized synthetic control method. We prespecified that we might compare the results from gsynth to the results from other synthetic control methods: the augmented synthetic control method (Ben-Michael, Feller, and Rothstein, 2018) and the original synthetic control method (Abadie and Gardeazabal, 2003). We have not yet conducted these comparisons.

5 Results

5.1 Experimental impact analysis

This section begins with the results from the primary specification of the analysis: estimating the impact of SOAR by regressing 2019–2020 FAFSA completion on an indicator for treatment and the blocking variables only (Equation 1). The primary specification is estimated at the AMP

level. Exhibit 18 shows for each experimental grantee the number of AMPs and the individual sample size (i.e., number of eligible youth) in both the treatment and control groups. The number of individuals in the sample varies given the outcome year due to people moving in 37 In particular, depending on the degree of missingness for those covariates in a particular donor pool, the model with covariates would sometimes produce estimates and standard errors identical to the model without covariates.

40

and out of their units and individuals aging in and out of the eligible age range. The exhibit shows that while the individual sample size is fairly large on its face ( n = 3, 834 age-eligible youth for the primary outcome), the sample size of AMPs is much smaller ( n = 78). Exhibit 19

shows the raw outcome counts and percentages.

41

Exhibit 18: Experimental analysis: sample demographics. Demographics correspond to the analytic sample for eligible for the 2019–2020 FAFSA cycle.

Sample

Demographics

Eligible for 19–20

Median

Count Eligible for cycle (primary

% Black % Hisp.

HH

AMPs

18-19 cycle

Group

PHA

outcome)

income

Treatment

LA

4

627

687

14

83

17,670

Control

LA

4

490

510

14

83

18,023

Treatment

Chicago

11

529

548

95

4

12,229

Control

Chicago

15

454

460

94

5

12,896

Treatment

Philly

10

370

387

93

5

13,777

Control

Philly

17

639

675

94

4

16,201

Treatment

Seattle

9

360

369

75

4

28,650

Control

Seattle

8

215

198

65

9

26,880

Overall

78

3,684

3,834

66

30

16,911

Exhibit 19: Raw counts and percentages for outcomes. Al refer to the 2019–2020 cycle and show counts and percentages before reweighting by the inverse probability of randomization. For the FAFSA counts, the denominator is residents aged 17–20; for the Pell and college counts, the denominator is shifted forward a year to residents aged 18–21.

Submit FAFSA (2019)

Enroll college (2019)

Group

PHA

N eligible Count

Percentages N eligible Count

Percentages

Treatment LA

687

226

32.9%

627

234

37.4%

Control

LA

510

181

35.6%

490

194

39.5%

Treatment Chicago

548

181

33.0%

529

166

31.4%

Control

Chicago

460

160

34.7%

454

150

33.1%

Treatment Philly

387

83

21.5%

370

87

23.6%

Control

Philly

675

171

25.3%

639

203

31.8%

Treatment Seattle

369

108

29.4%

360

135

37.6%

Control

Seattle

198

57

28.9%

215

72

33.4%

Treatment All non-

1,091

265

24.3%

1,179

268

22.7%

experimental

Based on the main method of inference (randomization inference), Project SOAR had no effect on FAFSA completion for the 2019–2020 school year. Exhibit 20 shows the observed treatment coefficient (at the vertical yellow line) relative to the distribution of m = 1, 000 permuted treatment coefficients. This is a basic graphical representation of a p value. A significant positive effect would 42

be one where the treatment effect was at the right tail of the distribution—that is, where only a small fraction of the distribution of permuted coefficients were to the right of the observed estimate. 38 As the graph shows, the estimated effect is near the center of the distribution, indicating that a difference of the observed magnitude is not unusual given random chance. More specifical y, the point estimate shows that treatment AMPs had an average FAFSA completion rate 4 percentage points lower than control AMPs, but the difference is not statistically significant ( p =

0.63).

Exhibit 20: Randomization Inference results for FAFSA Completion 2019–2020 cycle (blocking variables only): Distribution of permuted treatment coefficients. The figure shows that the observed treatment coefficient is neither larger nor smal er than the majority of permuted treatment coefficients, indicating a null effect.

A descriptive examination of the rates of FAFSA completion by PHA shows that, in most instances, the control group completion rates were higher than those in the treatment group. Exhibit 21

shows the proportions of FAFSA completion by PHA, accounting for the probability of AMPs being selected into treatment, but without additional adjustment for blocking variables or other covariates.

38 Conversely, if the treatment had a significant negative effect, the treatment effect would be at the left tail of the distribution and only a smal fraction of the estimates would be to the left of the observed estimate.

43

Exhibit 21: Descriptive rates of FAFSA Completion (2019–2020 cycle). The proportions are reweighted by the IPT weights, but otherwise do not adjust for covariates. The figure shows that in al PHAs except for Seattle, there were slightly lower completion rates among treatment group members, with large amounts of variation in the raw levels between PHAs.

Results from the secondary method of inference support the finding of a null effect from the main specification. Exhibit 22 shows the uncertainty around the estimates from the randomization inference procedure, and Exhibit 23 shows the uncertainty around the estimates from robust standard errors calculated from parametric estimation. In both cases, the graphs display a high degree of uncertainty around the treatment level (calculated as the control mean plus the treatment effect) and support the conclusion that the difference in the two levels cannot be differentiated from zero. Exhibit 24 shows the same general results by looking at the predicted values and confidence intervals separated by each PHA. Again, the story is the same: there are very smal differences between the treatment and control groups relative to the size of the uncertainty of the estimates.

44

Exhibit 22: Randomization Inference results for FAFSA Completion 2019-2020 cycle (blocking variables only): Proportions. Shows observed control mean and observed treatment mean. 95%

confidence intervals on control mean are based standard error of mean; 95% confidence interval (CI) on treatment mean are from adding the control mean to the 2.5th and 97.5th percentile of distribution of permuted treatment coefficients from randomization inference.

Exhibit 23: Parametric results for FAFSA Completion 2019–2020 cycle (blocking variables only): Combined across PHAs. Shows observed control mean and for treatment, the control mean plus the treatment coefficient. 95% CI on control mean are based standard error of mean; 95% CI on treatment mean are based on the standard error of the mean and the standard error of the estimated treatment effect.

45

Exhibit 24: Parametric results for FAFSA Completion 2019–2020 cycle (blocking variables only): Separate by PHA. Shows predicted values and 95% CI for each PHA. Other covariates in the model are set to their PHA-specific means.

The secondary model specifications adjusting for covariates also produce insignificant estimates; however, the point estimates are much larger. Exhibit 25 shows the observed positive treatment coefficient on 2019 to 2020 FAFSA completion relative to the m = 1000 permuted treatment coefficients. 39 The estimated effect of SOAR when adjusting for additional covariates is an increase in the rate of FAFSA completion of 62.2 percentage points, but the result is not statistical y significant ( p = 0.445) given the very high degree of uncertainty in the estimates.

The high degree of uncertainty likely stems from the smal sample size and the homogeneous nature of AMPs. Because there are so few AMPs, introducing covariates in effect creates a problem of very smal cells available for comparison (for example, think of comparing treatment and control AMPs within Milwaukee with a high proportion of Hispanic, non-White residents to each other). Given this high degree of variability, it is just as likely that even if we were to randomly pick 78 AMPs, we would be about as likely to see a similar difference in FAFSA completion—or even a difference of negative 62 percentage points—even though we know those AMPs are not the ones being offered SOAR. In other words, while the point estimate seems large, it should not be taken as evidence that SOAR is highly effective. The variability in these results is important to keep in mind when interpreting the results of the complier analysis described below.

The results for the secondary outcomes of interest are consistent with the FAFSA result. SOAR

had no significant impact on any of the secondary outcomes. Exhibit 49 in Appendix Section 7.9

39 Observant readers may notice that the X-axis extends well beyond the limits of what is a possible effect size due to the limitations of using linear probability models. In short, OLS models with outcomes bounded by zero and one may produce estimates outside of those bounds.

46

shows the point estimates, parametric standard errors, and randomization inference-based and parametric p values for the secondary specification of the impact on 2019–2020 FAFSA completion (Equation 2) and the col ege enrol ment and Pell receipt outcomes. In al cases, estimated effects are insignificant, which is perhaps not surprising given that without a positive effect on FAFSA completion, it would be unexpected to see positive effects on college enrol ment and extremely surprising to see a positive effect on Pell Grant receipt, which is dependent on FAFSA completion.

Exhibit 25: Randomization Inference results for FAFSA Completion 2019–2020 cycle (blocking +

additional covariate adjustment): Distribution of permuted treatment coefficients. The figure shows that the observed treatment coefficient is larger than the majority of permuted coefficients, but that there is a high degree of instability in these coefficients and that the difference is not statistically significant.

5.2 Experimental impact analysis: complier effect

This section describes the analysis on students who engaged in at least one in-person interaction with a navigator. Exhibit 26 shows the proportion of compliers by PHA and treatment status, with compliance defined as at least one in-person meeting between a navigator and a resident. The figure shows wide variation in the proportion of treatment group residents who met with a navigator at each PHA, ranging from about 15 percent (Los Angeles) to over 60

percent (Philadelphia). In addition, in Seattle, the different groupings of AMPs into treatment and control groups—one where students in the same AMP could be assigned to different treatment groups depending on which school they were zoned to attend—might have resulted in more meetings with students outside the analytic sample.

47

Exhibit 26: Rates of compliance by PHA and group assignment. The denominator of each is the number of age-eligible and residentially-eligible students in the group. The numerator of each is the number of these eligible residents who met at least once in person with a navigator.

Exhibit 27 shows the results of the complier analysis for the main outcome, restricted to students who:

• Could be matched to the interaction tracker data, and

• Having been matched, were coded to either:

1. 1 == complier: student was matched to the navigator’s participant tracker AND

the student had at least one in-person meeting with a navigator.

2. 0 == non-complier: student was matched to the navigator’s participant tracker and the student had no in-person meetings with a navigator—they may have had no meetings at al or meetings that were not in-person.

The exhibit shows that those who met with a navigator were more likely to complete FAFSA, but the results are not significant at the p < 0.05 level. The result deserves a closer look because the point estimate is large to the point of not being possible. The interpretation of the coefficient is that the average estimated effect was a 111 percentage point increase in the rate of FAFSA completion. This out-of-bounds estimate is a result of using a linear probability model that estimates Ordinary Least Squares using a binary outcome bounded by zero and one. The linear nature of the estimator al ows for estimates to lie outside of the zero to one range. That it does exceed one is somewhat expected, given that the covariate-adjusted ITT effect was 62

percentage points and the take-up rate is low. The complier estimator is, in effect, rescaling the ITT estimate based in part on the engagement rate, so it is not surprising to see the estimate 48

approximately double when the engagement rate is about 50 percent. 40 In this case, we recommend interpreting the estimate more as a sign of the high degree of uncertainty in the estimates and less as a signal of the magnitude of SOAR’s impact. In other words, the estimate is not significant, even though it is very large. Appendix Section 7.8 presents a robustness check with a different definition of compliance, which also results in an insignificant estimate.

Exhibit 27: Effect of treatment on compliers: main definition of compliance. The exhibit shows results from the two stage least squares method of analyzing complier effects discussed in Section 4.3.

Dependent variable:

FAFSA Complete (2019–2020)

Treatment (complier instrument)

1.114

(1.011)

p = 0.271

Male

–0.033

(0.093)

p = 0.719

Hispanic

–0.032

(ref: Black)

(0.087)

p = 0.713

Other

–0.154

(ref: Black)

(0.113)

p = 0.175

Total annual income

0.00000

(0.00000)

p = 0.053∗

Chicago

0.012

(ref: LA)

(0.129)

p = 0.927

Philly

–0.417

(ref: LA)

(0.210)

p = 0.048∗∗

Seattle

0.292

(ref: LA)

(0.418)

p = 0.485

Total HH members

–0.038

(0.026)

p = 0.144

Constant

–0.310

(0.760)

p = 0.684

40 When conducting analyses of the impact on compliers using the two-stage least squares method discussed in Section 4.3, researchers emphasize the importance of using a linear probability model at the first stage, since the properties of the 2SLS when using a nonlinear model at the first stage are poorly understood.

49

Observations

925

Residual Std. Error

0.591 (df = 915)

Note: ∗p<0.1; ∗∗p<0.05; ∗∗∗p<0.01

5.3 Non-experimental impact analysis: Synthetic Control Method

This analysis examines the results for the five non-experimental PHAs that made navigators available to all residents aged 15–20, rather than restricting eligibility to students living in certain AMPs. 41

Exhibit 28 shows trends over time in FAFSA completion in the five non-experimental treatment PHAs. 42 The figure shows the trends in FAFSA completion for each PHA going back to the 2007–

2008 FAFSA cycle and extending to the two cycles after the start of Project SOAR, which is demarcated by the vertical, dotted line. A visual analysis suggests some upward movement in the final year of analysis (the 2019–2020 FAFSA cycle), but it also shows some year-to-year variation in FAFSA completion rates over time at some PHAs.

41 Appendix Section 7.10 discusses the construction of the synthetic control donor pool and how the Department of Education’s policy of redacting data for cells with fewer than ten observations affect which PHAs are in the “donor pool” to serve as the comparator group.

42 For the remainder of this section, we refer to these as the treatment PHAs, except where necessary to distinguish between the four experimental treatment PHAs and five non-experimental treatment PHAs.

50

Exhibit 28: Trends in FAFSA completion: non-experimental treatment PHAs. Each dot on the graph represents the completion rate among those who met the eligibility criteria (age-eligible and a resident of the PHA at some point during the cycle). The missing dot in the 2016–2017 cycle for NW GA is due to the redaction of < 10 cel count.

While the PHAs did not have an especial y high number of eligible students (for example, NW

GA, the smal est PHA in the study, had approximately 89 eligible residents at the time of the grant awards), neither were they so smal that one would expect large swings in the rates of FAFSA completion from 1 year to the next. Despite this, both Prichard and Northwest Georgia see swings of about 10 percentage points between years. Even Milwaukee, with several hundred eligible youth, saw a drop in the rate of FAFSA completion by nearly 10 percentage points between the 2014–2015 and 2016–2017 FAFSA cycles. 43 Overal , the year-to-year fluctuations can make it more difficult to model a precise synthetic control unit as a comparison.

The result of the synthetic control method analysis is a positive but statistical y insignificant effect on FAFSA completion in the 2019–2020 cycle. Exhibit 29 shows results for the main synthetic control specification, with Exhibit 30 listing the estimates and p-values. For the figures, each bar represents the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) and 95 percent 43 Exhibit 51 decomposes the between-year variation into changes in the number of age-eligible youth residing in the PHA (denominator for completion rates) and changes in the number of students who submit the FAFSA (numerator).

The exhibit shows both changes in the number of eligible residents and changes in the number of those completing the FAFSA, suggesting some amount of fluidity on both margins.

51

confidence intervals. The blue bars show the 11 pre-treatment FAFSA cycles. If the match works well, these bars should be centered around zero, preferably with smal error bars, which would indicate that the procedure is both closely matching the pre-treatment trends of the grantees and also doing so with little uncertainty. The yellow bars show the two post-treatment FAFSA cycles where navigators had either started providing services (2018–2019 cycle) or were engaged in providing more robust services (2019–2020 cycle).

The main specification includes PHAs as donors even if they have some redacted FAFSA counts; they are included as donors for the years in which the counts are not redacted. That specification shows a modest, positive estimated increase in FAFSA completion of approximately 3 percentage points for the 2019–2020 FAFSA cycle, but the result is not statistically significant ( p = 0.28).

The secondary specification includes PHAs as donors only if they have no redacted FAFSA counts. In addition, since one of the treatment PHAs had redaction (Northwest Georgia), it is excluded from the analysis. The results, presented in Exhibit 31, show a similar modestly positive estimate of an increase in the FAFSA completion rate of about 4 percentage points for the focal post-treatment year, and the result is borderline significant ( p = 0.08).

Exhibit 29: Synthetic control treatment effect on FAFSA completion by year. The results are positive in the focal treatment year (2019–2020 FAFSA cycle) but not statistically significant ( p = 0.28).

52

Exhibit 30: Synthetic control results. The PHA-year specification corresponds to the specification where we retain PHAs in the donor pool as long as they have at least one non-redacted year of FAFSA data, with the PHA only serving as a donor during the observed years (Exhibit 29). The PHA specification corresponds to the specification that removes all PHAs with any redacted FAFSA cycles (Exhibit 31). The highlighted year was the main pre-registered primary outcome of interest.

Cycle

Spec.

ATT

CI.lower

CI.upper

p.value

Pre-treatment years

2007–2008

PHA-year

-0.02

-0.04

0.01

0.09

2007–2008

PHA

-0.02

-0.05

0.01

0.31

2008–2009

PHA-year

-0.01

-0.04

0.01

0.27

2008–2009

PHA

-0.01

-0.04

0.02

0.51

2009–2010

PHA-year

0.02

-0.01

0.05

0.25

2009–2010

PHA

0.02

-0.02

0.04

0.35

2010–2011

PHA-year

0.01

-0.02

0.03

0.72

2010–2011

PHA

0.00

-0.04

0.04

0.86

2011–2012

PHA-year

0.00

-0.03

0.03

0.93

2011–2012

PHA

0.00

-0.03

0.05

0.77

2012–2013

PHA-year

-0.01

-0.03

0.03

0.92

2012–2013

PHA

-0.00

-0.03

0.04

0.82

2013–2014

PHA-year

-0.00

-0.04

0.04

0.90

2013–2014

PHA

0.00

-0.04

0.05

0.87

2014–2015

PHA-year

-0.00

-0.03

0.03

0.93

2014–2015

PHA

0.00

-0.04

0.04

0.92

2015–2016

PHA-year

0.01

-0.02

0.04

0.60

2015–2016

PHA

0.00

-0.03

0.03

0.88

2016–2017

PHA-year

0.02

-0.01

0.05

0.18

2016–2017

PHA

0.02

-0.01

0.05

0.19

2017–2018

PHA-year

-0.01

-0.03

0.01

0.47

2017–2018

PHA

-0.02

-0.05

0.01

0.16

Post-treatment years

2018–2019

PHA-year

-0.01

-0.06

0.04

0.60

2018–2019

PHA

0.00

-0.05

0.06

0.93

2019–2020

PHA-year

0.03

-0.02

0.09

0.28

2019–2020

PHA

0.04

-0.00

0.09

0.08

Appendix Section 7.11 shows additional results for the secondary outcomes of Pell receipt and col ege enrol ment, which al show null estimated effects.

53

Exhibit 31: Synthetic control treatment effect on FAFSA completion by year: removal of PHAs with any redaction. The figure shows the ATT for each of the treatment years. The result is positive and borderline significant ( p = 0.08). In addition to changes in the donor pool for this model (PHAs with no redaction in FAFSA completion), the model also excludes the one treatment PHA (NW GA) with a redacted FAFSA cycle.

While the estimated results for FAFSA completion are not strictly significant, it is possible there is suggestive evidence of movement in the positive direction. Both specifications show estimated treatment effects for the focal post-treatment year that are fairly large relative to the estimates in the pre-treatment years (for example, they are larger than any of the predicted differences in the pre-treatment years), providing some evidence that we are not likely to see estimates of a similar size entirely by chance, but the confidence intervals given the estimation procedure are too wide for us to consider the result statistical y significant. Even if we assume there is a modest increase in FAFSA completion, there is no indication of any positive effect (modest or otherwise) on col ege enrol ment or Pel Grant receipt. In sum, the evidence from the non-experimental impact analysis suggests that SOAR did not achieve its primary goals.

6 Discussion

Given the results, we cannot say with confidence that Project SOAR improved FAFSA completion or other postsecondary educational outcomes. Past intensive interventions like the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (Scrivener et al. 2015; Miller et al. , 2020), One Mil ion Degrees (Bertrand et al. , 2019), and the New Hampshire Scholars program (Carrel and Sacerdote, 2017)

have shown effects of greater than 6 percentage points improvement in FAFSA completion.

There is no signal of similarly sized impacts from SOAR. Even though the experimental estimates 54

were estimated imprecisely due to the limited number of AMPs used for randomization, the results as a whole suggest that SOAR was less effective than those interventions among the eligible SOAR population as a whole.

6.1 Limitations

There are a few limitations and features of the study to keep in mind when interpreting the results.

Eligibility criteria:

The decision to adopt very broad eligibility rules based only on age made it more difficult to understand how effective Project SOAR might be among col ege-interested individuals in need of assistance. In particular, two sets of groups could attenuate the estimated impact. The first group is made up of 15- to 20-year-olds who are not considering col ege and are unlikely to reconsider their plans even if contacted by a navigator. The second group is made up of 15- to 20-year-olds who would attend col ege without additional assistance or are already attending.

Neither of these groups is likely to be helped by navigators, but both are included under the broad eligibility criteria.

Answering a question about the effectiveness of SOAR among al 15- to 20-year-olds (or 17- to 20-year-olds) may miss important effects on the subset of youth who are most in need of assistance. A more policy-relevant question may be to ask how effective the intervention is with respect to individuals who are on the margin of applying to col ege (perhaps identified along the lines of [Carrel and Sacerdote, 2017]), yet any such targeting of services would depend on PHAs col ecting additional educational information about residents. To the extent that many SOAR grantees had to navigate data-sharing agreements with local school districts, there could be a blueprint for how to strengthen ties between PHAs and local schools to identify students who are academical y on track for col ege but who require extra assistance to do so.

Local flexibility:

The main goal of an impact evaluation is to understand if a given program is effective, which assumes to some extent that the program in question can be easily defined. The emphasis on providing local flexibility, while allowing for adaptation and experimentation, makes it difficult to define what exactly Project SOAR is in the context of an analysis that pools across four and five distinct grantees. As the implementation analysis showed, grantees made different decisions as to where to focus limited resources. In many ways, the demonstration was a test of the average effect of nine different col ege access programs. While it is possible some local models worked well, this evaluation was not designed (or powered) to be able to examine grantees individual y.

As such, these results do not suggest al efforts were unsuccessful, just as they are not well positioned to identify specific strategies that seem to be more (or less) promising. While some level of variation is beneficial in program design, it also is helpful to define in detail what makes up the core program model. The ASAP program provides one good example of a core program 55

philosophy with some minor local variation (such as providing a smal stipend for gas/groceries in Ohio instead of providing a transit pass in New York [Miller et al. , 2020]). Structuring future grants to better identify core program features or more directly plan to identify and compare local variation can help to narrow relevant evaluation questions.

Program maturation:

The period of performance for the grant may have had an effect on performance. Grantees may not have been able to achieve program maturity given the 2-year grant period. It took grantees most of the first year to develop inroads with the community. Navigators were busy during this period learning and updating their approaches, and services provided during the first year of the grant were likely of different quality than those provided over the second year of the grant. By the time navigators were building more recognition in the community, grantees were already under pressure to make plans for the grant’s termination. In some cases, this may have created staffing problems. Additional y, most grantees observed that residents were reluctant to participate in a program that they thought would disappear in a short while (as has happened with many other new initiatives in the past). Designing demonstrations with longer grant periods may al ow for better program development and steady-state operations to emerge. Combining an impact analysis with a formative analysis in the early stages of the grant could help to identify which particular features of the program seem more or less effective.

Resource allocation:

Estimates about the resources needed to assist students effectively may have been wrong. HUD

made certain assumptions about the number of eligible students each navigator could reasonably be expected to recruit and assist, assuming a certain level of responsiveness from students. The assumptions may have been based on program models that required less time and energy devoted to recruitment than the PHA context required (for example, interventions focused in high schools do not have to contend with the resource-intensive process of going door-to-door to proactively educate people about the program), which may have made it difficult for navigators to spend time both recruiting new participants and working with students who were already engaged.

Non-compliance:

There likely were some individuals in the control group who meaningfully engaged with navigators. An early site visit to one of the grantees suggested that PHAs were having some trouble finding a clear demarcation between what was a SOAR service and what was a business-as-usual service. For example, they were actively recruiting treatment participants for col ege visits, but if a control person asked to go and there were empty seats, they included the control student. Most grantees suggested that they drew a clear line around in-person assistance. In theory, the complier analysis could adjust for these interactions, but only if interactions with control group individuals were reliably tracked in the interaction tracker, which we have reason to doubt (Exhibit 26). Early reports suggested that navigators may not always have recorded 56

control group students who were served in the interaction tracker. To the extent that there was more interaction with control group individuals than was measured in the data, the effect would tend to be biased downwards.

Generalizability:

The four experimental PHAs were ones that (1) applied for the grant and (2) had a large enough resident population that randomization was feasible. In turn, these PHAs have features that place limits on the settings to which the results generalize. First, the experimental PHAs are some of the largest in the country, meaning that the results from the experiment generalize best to other large PHAs. Second, the corresponding school districts al have some form of school choice, which could affect whether the most motivated students need an on-site navigator or whether they instead applied to selective high schools with robust col ege counseling. Final y, the experimental PHAs are located in places where there are other ongoing efforts to promote FAFSA completion at either the school district, city, or state level. For instance, in fall 2019, Il inois passed a “universal FAFSA completion” law that requires students to apply for FAFSA in order to graduate from high school. 44 While this legislation does not impact the students in the study, since it goes into effect for students starting in the 2020–2021 school year, it shows that we are studying the impact of navigators in settings where policymakers are general y interested in leveraging a variety of tools to promote FAFSA completion.

Limitations of the experimental analysis:

The original design was based on a power analysis which included Milwaukee as one of the experimental grantees. The loss of Milwaukee in the experimental component decreased the power of the study to detect significant effects. While we pre-registered that the study was powered to detect a 6 to 7 percentage point change using the randomization inference procedure and approximately a 5 percentage point change using parametric standard errors, the inclusion of PHA dummies in the actual analysis led to a decrease in the effective power. Some of the PHAs had fewer than 10 AMPs randomized to each group, meaning we were powered to detect something larger than a 6 to 7 percentage point change. While some of the most effective interventions have seen effects of 10 percentage points or higher, those interventions general y involved more intensive advising combined with other types of financial and non-financial supports that SOAR did not provide. Given that, we would reasonably expect SOAR to have a smal er effect, which was something we were not well powered to detect.

Limitations of the synthetic control method:

The final limitation applies to the non-experimental analysis, which showed a positive but non-significant effect of SOAR on FAFSA completion. One assumption of the synthetic control method is that units in the donor pool are untreated. Nearly al states in which PHAs are located have programs helping low-income students with FAFSA and other elements of the col ege 44 Students are also al owed to submit waivers seeking an exemption from the requirement.

57

application process; similarly, nearly all school districts where children residing in those PHAs attend have some form of navigator-like assistance. Because we consider the unique element of the present intervention to be the physical presence of a navigator at the PHA, rather than assistance provided at one’s local school or nearby nonprofits, we do not expect that other PHAs have interventions that share this feature. However, the presence of other interventions, and our inability to (1) understand the complete range of interventions that are present, and (2) exclude PHAs with similar ongoing interventions, means that some PHAs selected to be a part of the synthetic comparison will have a postsecondary initiative which could bias the estimated effect towards zero, assuming such programs increase postsecondary activity.

6.2 Conclusion

Project SOAR was a program that the grantees and communities very much appreciated and thought of as valuable for students who would slip through the cracks of other educational programs. Even so, grantees were unable to build their grants into mature models during the course of the grant’s period of performance. Even the grantees that used existing col ege access program models had to contend with implementation chal enges like figuring out how to get navigators permanent meeting space that impeded quick adoption. These ongoing chal enges suggest the model was not at a point where it was robust enough for this type of impact evaluation.

Outside of questions of program maturity, the null effects could result from other factors unrelated to the direct effectiveness of navigators at providing assistance to students, including: (1) navigators not assisting a large enough proportion of residents, (2) navigators assisting residents who were unlikely to ever complete the FAFSA or apply to col ege, and (3) navigators assisting residents who were always going to complete the FAFSA and apply to col ege. Without knowing more about who is interested in col ege and who needs help, it is difficult to direct navigators to where their services can make the biggest difference. Even if navigators can identify the group of interested individuals, it would not help with the limitations of an ITT

analysis unless there is additional data col ected at baseline. For example, something as simple as an application on which students express interest in navigator assistance could refine the target population. Students could express interest and then be randomized, or express interest fol owing randomization and then be randomized to either a higher or lower intensity of outreach. However it is accomplished, narrowing the pool of targeted students can help better align scarce resources with student needs and may mechanical y make evaluation easier.

The current body of evidence on col ege access interventions suggests that SOAR could be a valuable program model. Other intensive, in-person advising efforts have been shown to be effective. Before evaluating any similar efforts in the future, the program model should be more defined, sufficient resources should be in place to support navigators, and more effort should be made to identify and spend the most effort on the students who are both col ege-interested and in need of additional assistance.

58

7 Appendix and supplementary materials

7.1 Examples of the different data structures

Exhibit 32 uses simulated data to show the structure of the AMP-level data. We use the AMP-level data for the main confirmatory analysis that measures the causal impact of the navigators on FAFSA completion.

59

Exhibit 32: Example of data structure for AMP-level data (used for experimental analysis) PHA

AMP

treat

FAFSA_rate

perc_black

Chicago Housing Authority

1

0.00

0.63

0.35

Chicago Housing Authority

2

0.00

0.46

0.29

Chicago Housing Authority

. .

0.00

0.50

0.24

Chicago Housing Authority

4

1.00

0.53

0.23

Philadelphia Housing Authority

1

1.00

0.54

0.35

Philadelphia Housing Authority

2

0.00

0.54

0.27

Philadelphia Housing Authority

…

1.00

0.53

0.11

Philadelphia Housing Authority

4

1.00

0.54

0.34

Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles

1

0.00

0.58

0.17

Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles

2

1.00

0.60

0.31

Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles

…

1.00

0.52

0.20

Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles

4

1.00

0.49

0.40

Seattle Housing Authority

1

0.00

0.58

0.36

Seattle Housing Authority

2

1.00

0.53

0.27

Seattle Housing Authority

…

0.00

0.62

0.32

Seattle Housing Authority

4

0.00

0.46

0.27

Similarly, Exhibit 33 uses simulated data to show the structure of the individual-level data. 45 We use the individual-level data for the descriptive analysis of whom navigators serve, and to adjust the main causal estimates to measure the effect of the treatment on students that navigators met with (rather than effect of the treatment on al eligible students).

Exhibit 33: Example of data structure for individual-level data (used for descriptive engagement analysis and adjusting causal analysis for the proportion of youth engaged) PHA

AMP

treat

Youth_id

Met with

FAFSA

navigator

Chicago Housing Authority

1

0.00

7120

0

1

Chicago Housing Authority

2

0.00

4263

0

0

Chicago Housing Authority

…

0.00

4517

0

0

Chicago Housing Authority

4

1.00

7001

1

1

Philadelphia Housing Authority

1

1.00

1879

0

0

Philadelphia Housing Authority

2

0.00

4708

0

0

Philadelphia Housing Authority

…

1.00

4667

1

1

45 For simplicity, we omit covariates.

60

PHA

AMP

treat

Youth_id

Met with

FAFSA

navigator

Philadelphia Housing Authority

4

1.00

9816

0

1

Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles 1

0.00

4235

0

0

Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles 2

1.00

5840

0

1

Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles …

1.00

6950

0

1

Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles 4

1.00

1900

1

1

Seattle Housing Authority

1

0.00

5875

0

1

Seattle Housing Authority

2

1.00

4396

1

1

Seattle Housing Authority

…

0.00

8246

0

0

Seattle Housing Authority

4

0.00

6706

0

1

Exhibit 34 uses simulated data to show the structure of the PHA-level data. We use the PHA-level data for the non-experimental analysis of navigator impact. The data show average rates of FAFSA completion over time and are used to create a synthetic control for the five nonexperimental grantees.

Exhibit 34: Example of data structure for PHA-level data (used for quasi-experimental analysis of effect of navigators on residents of sites that did not randomize)

PHA

FAFSA_rate

perc_black

City of Phoenix Housing Department

0.53

0.19

High Point Housing Authority

0.52

0.13

Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee

0.62

0.17

Northwest Georgia Housing Authority

0.54

0.20

Prichard Housing Authority

0.57

0.19

7.2 Additional details: quantitative analysis of implementation

Here, we provide additional details on the quantitative analysis of program implementation that we discuss in Section 3.5. First, the templates for interaction trackers given to navigators included definitions for the following fields:

• Converser: e.g., student versus parent.

• Medium and Mode.

• Topics: e.g., application process or financial literacy.

• Purpose: e.g., outreach and education; fol ow-up or check-in.

• Obstacles: e.g., financial; documentation.

• Engagement level: uncontacted, engaged, or disengaged.

61

Due to data reliability, our primary analyses look at two dimensions: first is medium and mode; second is who the converser was. Exhibit 35 shows the specific definitions for these. Within the same definition, Exhibit 36 shows that the navigators’ hand-inputting of data led to multiple variations of the same entry—for instance, five different forms of describing one-on-one counseling.

62

Exhibit 35: Definitions for key interaction tracker elements Medium/mode

Texting

A single text message or text message conversation between the navigator and the conversant taking place during the specified day

Phone call

A phone conversation or voicemail between the navigator and the conversant

taking place during the specified day

Email

A single email or email exchange between the navigator and the conversant

taking place during the specified day

Social Media

A single email or email exchange between the navigator and the conversant

taking place during the specified day

Webinar

An attended webinar scheduled for the specified date

One on one/counseling

An in-person, individual interaction involving only one participant (but possibly including guardians, school officials, or others)

Small Group/workshop

An in-person interaction involving a smaller number of participants and allowing for substantial individual participant-navigator communication

Large group/event

A large, in-person interaction involving several participants with limited

opportunity for individual participant-navigator communication

Letter

Individualized communication delivered through the postal system

Literature mailing

Delivery of pre-existing literature or materials through the postal system

Converser

Participant

The FAFSA eligible AMP resident being assisted by the navigator

Parent/Guardian

A primary caregiver for FAFSA eligible AMP resident

Participant and Parent/Guardian BOTH the primary caregiver AND the FAFSA eligible AMP resident are present for the interaction

School Official w/wo

A teacher, guidance counseled, or similar official related to the FAFSA eligible AMP resident is present for the interaction

63

Exhibit 36: Variation in interaction trackers’ inputted data within the same field. The left panel shows variation within the converser field; the right panel shows variation within the medium/mode field.

64

Exhibit 37: Top words in free-text notes on one-on-one counseling: experimental PHAs 65

Exhibit 38: Top words in free-text notes on one-on-one counseling: non-experimental PHAs Exhibit 39: Illustration of sequences with 20 randomly-chosen students

66

7.3 Details on construction of analytic sample

Exhibit 40: Code snippet for defining eligibility to appear in a cycle

67

7.4 Replicating the random assignment process

The fol owing code can be used to replicate the random assignment process:

# this function takes a dataset with PHA and AMP identifiers and completes

##the assignment algorithm with

# a set of predefined parameters for staff size and workload.

##To create permutations, the input list needs to be

# randomly sorted again before the function is run

# Set the list of PHAs and the number of navigators and max workload

for each

state <- c("CA", "IL", "PA", "WA") nav <- c(3, 3, 2, 3) ml <- c(150,150,150,82)

pha.params <- cbind.data.frame(state,nav,ml)

# Assume individual takeup rate ("rate") for offered services:

68

rate <- 0.5

assignment <-

function(input, pha.params){

# Create a container dset called "substates" (just initialize to input) substates <- input[1, ]

# Want the dset to be empty, so empty it

substates <- substates[-1, ]

# Now we have a dset with all the same variables

as input, # but empty; we'll fill it

# up with data once the random sorting and

allocation # have allowed us to make

treatment

# assignments.

for (s in c("IL", "PA", "CA", "WA")){

# Deal only with one state at a time:

st <- input[input$state == s, ]

# Number of AMPs in PHA s:

(st_n <- dim(st)[1])

# Number of navigators in PHA s:

(nn <- pha.params$nav[pha.params$state == s])

# Calculate the total load for AMP1 outside the loop:

st$tot.load[1] <- st$tot.served[1]

# Assign the first AMP to treatment outside the loop:

st$treat[1] <- 1

# Initialize index varible i:

i <- 2

# Begin while loop, calculating as long as the total workload is

less than or # equal to the maximum load per navigator times the

number of navigators: while (st$tot.load[i-1] <=

pha.params$ml[pha.params$state==s]*nn){

# Calculate running total load

st$tot.load[i] <- sum(st$tot.served[1:i])

# Assign to treatment as long as the while loop is still going

st$treat[i] <- 1

# Increment i

i <- i + 1

}

# Build the "substates" data by stacking finished "st" data frames on top of # each other.

substates <- rbind(substates, st)

}

return(substates)

}

69

7.5 Additional results: experimental analysis. Secondary specification for main outcome

Section 5.1 focused on experimental results from our primary specification, which controls only for the PHA dummy and the number of youth in the AMP (Equation 1). The present section focuses on experimental results from the secondary specifications (Equation 2), which controls for both those blocking variables and the fol owing covariates:

• Race/ethnicity: Percent of youth who are Non-Hispanic Black; Hispanic; Non-Hispanic other.

• Percent of youth who are citizens.

• Mean total annual income of the household in which the youth resides.

7.6 Additional results: experimental analysis. Differences in demographics between PHAs and across treatment conditions

The model adjusting for covariates is relevant because (1) AMPs within a PHA differ along youth attributes that past research shows are relevant for FAFSA completion and (2) some of these attributes remain imbalanced within a PHA even after the inverse probability of treatment reweighting discussed in Section 4.3 Exhibit 41 shows that although most of the variation in race/ethnicity is between PHAs (most notably, LA as majority Hispanic, Seattle as a mix of Black and “Other,” Chicago and Philadelphia as majority Black), there is remaining within-PHA variation. Similarly, Exhibit 42 shows variation not only between PHAs (e.g., Seattle’s income distribution is higher than Chicago’s) but also variation at the modified AMP level within a PHA.

Exhibit 41: Race/ethnicity comparison across PHAs and AMPs. Each dot represents one modified AMP

used in randomization.

70

Exhibit 42: Household income comparison across PHAs and AMPs. Each bar represents one modified AMP used in randomization.

Important for our purposes, however, are differences in the demographics between AMPs randomized to treatment and AMPs randomized to control. Exhibit 43 shows the overal balance across PHAs. As expected, the randomization process resulted in the treatment group having larger AMPs, but these differences persist after reweighting for randomization probabilities. The treatment AMPs also have a slightly lower percentage of non-Black, non-Hispanic race/ethnicity.

Since each of the models (Equation 1; Equation 2) controls for a PHA dummy, more important are differences in the treatment versus control group composition within the same PHA. Exhibit 44 shows those differences. LA is the only PHA with a large non-citizen population, that variable remains imbalanced (and higher in the treatment AMPs). Seattle has a higher percent Black demographic in the treatment AMPs and a higher median household income. Overal , the differences (1) motivate the use of a specification that includes additional covariate controls, but (2) show that the combination of a PHA dummy with control variables may lead to highly unstable estimates because some PHAs have very low proportions of certain demographic groups.

71

Exhibit 43: Differences between treatment and control AMPs: Full sample; raw differences since all variables are aggregated to the AMP level, the figure shows either the mean proportions (binary variables) or mean values (continuous variables) across treatment and control AMPs. Al are reweighted by the inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW).

Exhibit 44: Differences between treatment and control AMPs: full sample and by PHA; standardized difference in means. Each dot either represents one PHA or al PHAs (gray). Al estimates are reweighted by the IPTW.

72

7.7 Additional results: experimental analysis. Results from models with additional covariate adjustment

Exhibit 25 in the main text shows the observed positive treatment coefficient on 2019 to 2020

FAFSA completion relative to the m = 1000 permuted treatment coefficients. Here, Exhibit 45

shows the rates based on constructing confidence intervals using those permuted treatment coefficients, which are wide due to the variability in the estimates depending on the treatment permutation. Exhibit 46 shows the rates based on parametric standard errors across al PHAs, and Exhibit 47 shows the rates based on parametric standard errors specific to each PHA.

Overal , the results show that, after adjusting for covariates associated with FAFSA completion and that remain imbalanced across treatment groups, the treatment group completed the FAFSA at higher rates. but the differences are not statistical y significant and are highly uncertain due to minimal within-PHA variation in some demographic traits.

Exhibit 45: Randomization Inference results for FAFSA Completion 2019–2020 cycle (blocking +

additional covariate adjustment): proportions. Shows observed control mean and observed treatment mean. 95% confidence intervals on control mean are based standard error of mean; 95% CI on treatment mean are from adding the control mean to the 2.5th and 97.5th percentile of distribution of permuted treatment coefficients from randomization inference.

73

Exhibit 46: Parametric results for FAFSA Completion 2019–2020 cycle (blocking + additional covariate adjustment): combined across PHAs. Shows observed control mean and for treatment, the control mean plus the treatment coefficient. 95% CI on control mean are based standard error of mean; 95% CI on treatment mean are vart + varint − 2 ∗ covar(t, int).

Exhibit 47: Parametric results for FAFSA Completion 2019–2020 cycle (blocking + additional covariate adjustment): separate by PHA. Shows predicted values and 95% CI for each PHA. Other covariates in the model are set to their PHA-specific means.

7.8 Additional results: experimental analysis. Alternate definition of compliance.

We also analyzed a supplementary form of compliance that includes al age and residentially eligible residents, rather than residents who could be matched to the participant lists in the trackers. For this robustness check, compliance was coded as the fol owing:

1.

1 == complier: youth is matched to the navigator tracker AND the youth has

at least one in-person meeting with a navigator

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2.

0 = non-complier: youth is not matched to the navigator tracker OR the

youth is matched but has no in-person meetings with a navigator

The reason this version of compliance is less preferred than the version discussed in Section 5.2

is that the zeroes contain a mixture of those whose compliance status is unknown because they are never matched to the tracker and those whose compliance status is known to have never met in person (since they matched). Exhibit 48 presents the results from this specification, which are close to zero and non-significant.

Exhibit 48: Effect of treatment on compliers: alternate definition of compliance Dependent variable:

FAFSA_Complete_2019–2020

complier

–0.027

(0.038)

p = 0.478

genderM

–0.118

(0.015)

p = 0.000∗∗∗

raceHispanic

0.037

(0.027)

p = 0.175

raceOther

–0.012

(0.035)

p = 0.723

tot_annual_income

0.00000

(0.00000)

p = 0.002∗∗∗

PARTICIPANT_CODEIL002

0.008

(0.029)

p = 0.786

PARTICIPANT_CODEPA002

–0.095

(0.030)

p = 0.002∗∗∗

PARTICIPANT_CODEWA001

0.006

(0.031)

p = 0.844

tot_household_members

–0.014

(0.004)

p = 0.0004∗∗∗

Constant

0.399

(0.033)

p = 0.000∗∗∗

Observations

3,787

Residual Std. Error

0.631 (df = 3777)

75

Note: ∗p<0.1; ∗∗p<0.05; ∗∗∗p<0.01

7.9 Additional results: experimental analysis. Secondary outcomes

Exhibit 49 summarizes the results for the secondary outcomes, which include FAFSA completion during the 2018–2019 cycle during which navigators were stil at the early phases of implementation and the Pell receipt and col ege enrol ment outcomes. The secondary results largely fol ow the main ones in terms of (1) a close to zero and negative point estimate in the model that just controls for blocking variables, and (2) a positive but imprecise point estimate in the model that controls for other covariates.

Exhibit 49: Experimental results: secondary outcomes

Outcome

Specification

β

SE

p-value

p-value

(robust)

(RI)

Complete FAFSA (2018-2019)

Blocking

-0.10

0.07

0.80

0.37

Complete FAFSA (2018-2019)

Blocking+dem

-0.20

0.10

0.34

0.80

Enroll college

Blocking

0.02

0.07

0.33

0.80

Enroll college

Blocking+dem

0.46

0.03

0.28

0.42

Enroll Tier I college

Blocking

-0.07

0.07

0.86

0.39

Enroll Tier I college

Blocking+dem

0.02

0.03

0.38

0.98

Enroll Tier II college

Blocking

-0.07

0.08

0.37

0.34

Enroll Tier II college

Blocking+dem

0.15

0.56

0.42

0.80

Enroll Tier III

Blocking

-0.03

0.77

0.80

0.28

Enroll Tier III

Blocking+dem

0.29

0.51

0.77

0.39

Enroll Tier IV

Blocking

0.01

0.28

0.30

0.87

Enroll Tier IV

Blocking+dem

0.15

0.42

0.72

0.79

Receive Pell

Blocking

-0.03

0.13

0.08

0.32

Receive Pell

Blocking+dem

-0.23

0.69

0.98

0.12

7.10 Additional results: synthetic control analysis. Details on analysis and construction of the donor pool.

The main text of Section 5.3 shows variability in FAFSA completion rates over time. Because PHA-level completion rates are a dual function of (1) the number of age-eligible students residing in a PHA, and (2) the count of those students who complete the FAFSA, overal changes in the rate stem from a mix of each of the two sources.

Exhibit 50, an alternative way of presenting the FAFSA completion rates presented in the main text of Exhibit 29, shows the variability in overal rates comes from a mixture of variation in each source.

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Exhibit 50: Trends in FAFSA completion: non-experimental treatment PHAs (separating counts of completion from counts of age and residentially eligible). The figure shows general declines in the 17–20 populations in some PHAs.

The generalized synthetic control method uses control units—in our case, PHAs that were neither an experimental grantee nor a non-experimental grantee—to model trends in FAFSA completion and impute counterfactual, post-treatment outcomes for the treated units. This modeling is complicated by the fact that our outcomes are selectively redacted; PHAs who had fewer than 10 students complete the FAFSA in a given year46 have a missing completion count.

To be in the donor pool, PHAs need at least 1 year of non-redacted FAFSA data. Exhibit 51

shows the number of cycles we observe for each PHA—for the majority of PHAs, which were significantly smal er than the grantees, al cycles are redacted (the large bar at 0). Exhibit 52, a heatmap of this redaction in the pre- versus post-treatment cycles, shows that the redaction occurs in both types of cycles rather than differential y pre- or post-treatment. In sum, this means that smal er PHAs are excluded from the donor pool. Our estimated treatment effects generalize best to the types of PHAs that, similar to the five grantees, have high-enough FAFSA counts to make it into the donor pool.

46 Or receive a Pell grant or enroll in college, for those outcomes.

77

Exhibit 51: Redaction of FAFSA counts due to small cell sizes. The figure shows a high count of PHAs that, due to their low number of youth residents, had fewer than ten students complete the FAFSA across many cycles, leading to redaction.

Exhibit 52: Redaction of FAFSA counts due to small cell sizes: pre- versus post-treatment years. The figure shows that the majority of PHAs have 0 non-redacted values in both the pre-treatment FAFSA cycles and the post-treatment FAFSA cycles. This decreases the concern that removing PHAs with redaction from the donor pool induces post-treatment bias.

78

The fol owing figures provide some insight into PHAs that fal into the fol owing four categories: 1. Non-experimental treatment PHAs. These are the five grantees discussed in Exhibit 2.

Four of the five PHAs had complete counts across all 13 cycles; one (NW GA) had one redaction (2016–2017 cycle).

2. PHAs with non-redacted FAFSA completion data across all 13 cycles. These PHAs are ones with thirteen complete cycles of FAFSA completion and are included in both of the specifications discussed in Section 5.3.

3. PHAs with non-redacted FAFSA completion data for at least one of the 13 cycles but that have redaction for at least one cycle. These PHAs are included in the secondary specification discussed in Section 5.3 (PHA-year, which includes PHAs in the donor pool for the years in which they have complete FAFSA data). 47

4. PHAs with redacted FAFSA completion data for all 13 cycles. These PHAs are not included in the synthetic control analysis donor pool.

Exhibit 53, drawing on the Picture of Subsidized Households data discussed in Section 4.1,

shows that the PHAs removed from the donor pool due to fully-redacted data are significantly smal er than the focal treatment PHAs (people_total), have more elderly residents (pct_age62plus), and have a much lower percentage of minority residents. In contrast, the PHAs that remain in the donor pool are more similar to the treatment PHAs in terms of total residents, minority composition, and fewer elderly residents. Exhibit 54 shows the spatial relationships between the PHAs of each type.

47 In Exhibit 53, this group is labeled “Included main spec.: excluded PHA-level deletion.”

79

Exhibit 53: Comparison of donor pool PHAs with treatment PHAs: resident attributes. The bars represent the mean across that group of PHA. Attributes are from the Picture of Subsidized Housing data using the year 2016, a pre-treatment year that corresponds roughly to the year that PHAs would be applying to SOAR.

Exhibit 54: Comparison of donor pool PHAs with treatment PHAs: locations. The gray dots represent PHAs that are not in the donor pool due to redaction; the yel ow dots represent PHAs always in the donor pool; the ochre dots represent PHAs sometimes contributing to the donor pool depending on the year.

The map of these PHAs in relation to the focal treatment PHAs shows that, rather than being spatially proximate, the donor PHAs might represent those in other larger suburbs/cities within the state.

80

Finally, Exhibit 55 presents another way of visualizing the analytic results of the synthetic control model focused on FAFSA completion. Rather than the treatment effect by year, it shows the match between the observed FAFSA completion rates in the treated PHAs (treated average) and the predicted completion rates in the synthetic control (estimated Y0 average). In line with the main results, there is an uptick in the treated PHAs relative to the counterfactual controls in FAFSA completion cycle 2019–2020.

Exhibit 55: Observed trends in treated PHA versus counterfactual trends based on donor PHAs.

7.11 Additional results: synthetic control analysis. Secondary outcomes.

The main outcome is whether the student completes the FAFSA, an important input to col ege attendance for low-income students. Here, we analyze results for the secondary outcomes related to col ege enrol ment and Pell receipt.

Exhibit 56, focusing on the non-experimental treatment PHAs, shows that general y, a lower percentage of students enrol in col ege than complete the FAFSA.

81

Exhibit 56: FAFSA completion versus college enrollment. Each dot represents the rate for one PHA-cycle.

The generalized synthetic control model showed no significant impact on either Pell receipt or col ege enrol ment in the post-treatment year: 2019–2020. Exhibit 57 presents the results for Pell receipt and shows a point estimate close to zero that is not statistical y significant. Exhibit 58

presents the results for col ege enrol ment, which also show a close to zero and non-significant effect during the post-treatment year.

Exhibit 57: Synthetic control treatment effect on Pell receipt by year

82

Exhibit 58: Synthetic control treatment effect on college enrollment by year 83

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U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

Office of Policy Development and Research

Washington, DC 20410-6000

August 2021

Document Outline

1 Introduction

2 Disparities in educational opportunity

2.1 Barriers to college

2.2 Prior interventions

3 Project SOAR design and implementation

3.1 Program design

3.2 Implementation analysis

3.3 Implementation data sources

Implementation site visits

SOAR data systems

3.4 Program development

3.5 Outreach and engagement

Variation in the types of interactions

Timing of engagement

Outreach challenges

Demographic characteristics of engagement

3.6 Clusters of variation

4 Impact analysis

4.1 Data and data structure

4.2 Outcome variables to be analyzed

4.3 Experimental impact analysis

Random assignment process

Statistical models

Inference criteria, including any adjustments for multiple comparisons

4.4 Non-experimental impact analysis

Donor pool

4.5 Preferred specification

4.6 Deviations from the analysis plan

5 Results

5.1 Experimental impact analysis

5.2 Experimental impact analysis: complier effect

5.3 Non-experimental impact analysis: Synthetic Control Method

6 Discussion

6.1 Limitations

Eligibility criteria:

Local flexibility:

Program maturation:

Resource allocation:

Non-compliance:

Generalizability:

Limitations of the experimental analysis:

Limitations of the synthetic control method:

6.2 Conclusion

7 Appendix and supplementary materials

7.1 Examples of the different data structures

7.2 Additional details: quantitative analysis of implementation

7.3 Details on construction of analytic sample

7.4 Replicating the random assignment process

7.5 Additional results: experimental analysis. Secondary specification for main outcome

7.6 Additional results: experimental analysis. Differences in demographics between PHAs and across treatment conditions

7.7 Additional results: experimental analysis. Results from models with additional covariate adjustment

7.8 Additional results: experimental analysis. Alternate definition of compliance.

7.9 Additional results: experimental analysis. Secondary outcomes

7.10 Additional results: synthetic control analysis. Details on analysis and construction of the donor pool.

7.11 Additional results: synthetic control analysis. Secondary outcomes.

References