Truant
Why Do Whites and the Rich Have Less Need for Education?
William Mangino
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, July 2012, Pages 562-602
Abstract:
This article hypothesizes that privileged social classes rely less on education to reproduce the next generation's social status. Privileged individuals disproportionately turn away from academics because they have many "informal" opportunities. The "aspiring classes," conversely, are more reliant on education because they lack the advantages that come from nonacademic sources, like social networks, family relations, and other institutionalized mechanisms. Applying logistic regression to the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and its high school transcript data, this hypothesis is implied in two ways. First, when social backgrounds are controlled, African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians are more likely to complete high school and go to college relative to white people. A second analysis shows that the relationship between family income and education is curvilinear. As income increases from poverty through the middle classes, the pursuit of education increases as socioeconomic barriers are removed. But among families with the highest annual incomes, there are marked decreases in rates of high school completion and transition to college. The article concludes that "equality of opportunity" is not achievable because numerous informal opportunities exist for traditionally advantaged segments of the US population.
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Evaluating Student Outcomes at For-Profit Colleges
Kevin Lang & Russell Weinstein
NBER Working Paper, June 2012
Abstract:
Using the Beginning Postsecondary Student Survey, we examine the effect on earnings of obtaining certificates/degrees from for-profit, not-for-profit, and public institutions. Students who enter certificate programs at any type of institution do not gain from earning a certificate. However, among those entering associates degree programs, there are large, statistically significant benefits from obtaining certificates/degrees from public and not-for-profit but not from for-profit institutions. These results are robust to addressing selection into the labor market from college, and into positive earnings from unemployment, using imputation methods and quantile regression along with a maximum likelihood sample selection model.
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The Effects of High School Math Curriculum on College Attendance: Evidence from the NLSY97
Alison Aughinbaugh
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using a sample of youth who graduated from high school in the late 1990s and early 2000s, this paper examines the impact of high school math curriculum on the decision to go to college. Results that control for unobserved differences between students and their families suggest that a more rigorous high school math curriculum is associated with a higher probability of attending college and of attending a 4-year college. The household fixed effect results imply that students who take an advanced academic math curriculum in high school (algebra II or precalculus, trigonometry, or calculus) are about 17 percentage points more likely to go to college and 20 percentage points more likely to start college at a 4-year school by age 21 compared to those students whose highest math class was algebra I or geometry.
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Schooling, Educational Achievement, and the Latin American Growth Puzzle
Eric Hanushek & Ludger Woessmann
Journal of Development Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Latin American economic development has been perceived as a puzzle. The region has trailed most other world regions over the past half century despite relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle, however, can be resolved by considering educational achievement, a direct measure of human capital. We introduce a new, more inclusive achievement measure that comes from splicing regional achievement tests into worldwide tests. In growth regressions, the positive growth effect of educational achievement fully accounts for the poor growth performance of Latin American countries. These results are confirmed in a number of instrumental-variable specifications that exploit plausibly exogenous achievement variation stemming from historical and institutional determinants of educational achievement. Finally, a development accounting analysis finds that, once educational achievement is included, human capital can account for between half and two thirds of the income differences between Latin America and the rest of the world.
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Enhancing the Efficacy of Teacher Incentives through Loss Aversion: A Field Experiment
Roland Fryer et al.
NBER Working Paper, July 2012
Abstract:
Domestic attempts to use financial incentives for teachers to increase student achievement have been ineffective. In this paper, we demonstrate that exploiting the power of loss aversion - teachers are paid in advance and asked to give back the money if their students do not improve sufficiently - increases math test scores between 0.201 (0.076) and 0.398 (0.129) standard deviations. This is equivalent to increasing teacher quality by more than one standard deviation. A second treatment arm, identical to the loss aversion treatment but implemented in the standard fashion, yields smaller and statistically insignificant results. This suggests it is loss aversion, rather than other features of the design or population sampled, that leads to the stark differences between our findings and past research.
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Early to Rise? The Effect of Daily Start Times on Academic Performance
Finley Edwards
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Local school districts often stagger daily start times for their schools in order to reduce busing costs. This paper uses data on all middle school students in Wake County, NC from 1999-2006 to identify the causal effect of daily start times on academic performance. Using variation in start times within schools over time, the effect is a two percentile point gain in math test scores - roughly fourteen percent of the black-white test score gap. I find similar results for reading scores and using variation in start times across schools. The effect is stronger for students in the lower end of the distribution of test scores. I find evidence supporting increased sleep as a mechanism through which start times affect test scores. Later start times compare favorably on cost grounds to other education interventions which result in similar test score gains.
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Michael Anderson
NBER Working Paper, June 2012
Abstract:
Spending on big-time college athletics is often justified on the grounds that athletic success attracts students and raises donations. Testing this claim has proven difficult because success is not randomly assigned. We exploit data on bookmaker spreads to estimate the probability of winning each game for college football teams. We then con- dition on these probabilities using a propensity score design to estimate the effects of winning on donations, applications, and enrollment. The resulting estimates represent causal effects under the assumption that, conditional on bookmaker spreads, winning is uncorrelated with potential outcomes. Two complications arise in our design. First, team wins evolve dynamically throughout the season. Second, winning a game early in the season reveals that a team is better than anticipated and thus increases expected season wins by more than one-for-one. We address these complications by combining an instrumental variables-type estimator with the propensity score design. We find that winning reduces acceptance rates and increases donations, applications, academic reputation, in-state enrollment, and incoming SAT scores.
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Twice Considered: Charter Schools and Student Achievement in Utah
Yongmei Ni & Andrea Rorrer
Economics of Education Review, October 2012, Pages 835-849
Abstract:
A relatively small state, Utah presents an interesting case to study charter schools given its friendly policy environment and its significant growth in charter school enrollment. Based on longitudinal student-level data from 2004 to 2009, this paper utilizes two approaches to evaluate the Utah charter school effectiveness: (a) hierarchical linear growth models with matched sample, and (b) general methods of moments with student-fixed effects regressions. Both methods yield consistent results that charter schools on average perform slightly worse as compared to traditional public schools, a result that is primarily affected by the low effectiveness and high student mobility of newlyestablished charter schools. Interestingly, when charter schools gain more experience they become as effective as traditional public schools, and in some cases more effective than traditional public schools. This research has implications for local and state charter school policies, particularly policies that avoid "start-up" costs associated with new charter schools.
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Children's Early Literacy Growth in Relation to Classmates' Self-Regulation
Lori Skibbe et al.
Journal of Educational Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Classmates' academic skill level (peer effects) is emerging as an important predictor of individual student achievement, particularly in the early grades. However, less is known about the influence of peer effects with regard to classmates' self-regulation skills and whether they are associated with students' academic gains. Examining this is the purpose of the current study. Using a direct measure of self-regulation, the head-toes-knees-shoulders (HTKS), which assesses students' ability to coordinate their attention, ability to inhibit and switch tasks, and working memory, the classroom mean HTKS was computed to represent peer effects. With 2 cohorts of 1st graders, the effect of peers' self-regulation on literacy outcomes was examined, controlling for individual student self-regulation. In Cohort 1, 445 participants from 46 1st grade classrooms in 10 schools were included. In Cohort 2, 633 students in 68 classrooms in 18 schools were included. Using hierarchical linear modeling, peer effects predicted children's growth in passage comprehension (Cohen's d = 0.35 for Cohort 1 and 0.31 for Cohort 2) as well as their vocabulary growth (Cohen's d = 0.24 for Cohort 1 and 0.16 for Cohort 2). These were independent effects above that of individual children's fall self-regulation and school-wide percentage of students qualifying for the U.S. free and reduced price lunch program, which were both significantly related to student literacy outcomes.
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Johannes Westberg
History of Education, forthcoming
Abstract:
What was the impact of government grants on the emerging national elementary school systems of the nineteenth century? This article deals with this question through a study of the introduction of matching government grants in Sweden during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The analysis shows that, although the government grants increased rapidly with the introduction of matching grants, they did not crowd out local funding. Instead, the grants stimulated local taxation, increasing the number of teachers as well as their salaries. This occurred because the grants were perceived as an incentive by local school boards and because the financial control of the Swedish elementary school system remained at a local level. Thus, this article also contributes to the research on the expansion of mass education during the nineteenth century, commenting on the significance of both state intervention and a decentralised organisation.
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Yongyun Shin
Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, August 2012, Pages 543-574
Abstract:
Does reduced class size cause higher academic achievement for both Black and other students in reading, mathematics, listening, and word recognition skills? Do Black students benefit more than other students from reduced class size? Does the magnitude of the minority advantages vary significantly across schools? This article addresses the causal questions via analysis of experimental data from Tennessee's Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio study where students and teachers are randomly assigned to small or regular class type. Causal inference is based on a three-level multivariate simultaneous equation model (SM) where the class type as an instrumental variable (IV) and class size as an endogenous regressor interact with a Black student indicator. The randomized IV causes class size to vary which, by hypothesis, influences academic achievement overall and moderates a disparity in academic achievement between Black and other students. Within each subpopulation characterized by the ethnicity, the effect of reduced class size on academic achievement is the average causal effect. The difference in the average causal effects between the race ethnic groups yields the causal disparity in academic achievement. The SM efficiently handles ignorable missing data with a general missing pattern and is estimated by maximum likelihood. This approach extends Rubin's causal model to a three-level SM with cross-level causal interaction effects, requiring intact schools and no interference between classrooms as a modified Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption. The results show that, for Black students, reduced class size causes higher academic achievement in the four domains each year from kindergarten to third grade, while for other students, it improves the four outcomes except for first-grade listening in kindergarten and first grade only. Evidence shows that Black students benefit more than others from reduced class size in first-, second-, and third-grade academic achievement. This article does not find evidence that the causal minority disparities are heterogeneous across schools in any given year.
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Aimee Chin, Meltem Daysal & Scott Imberman
NBER Working Paper, June 2012
Abstract:
Texas requires a school district to offer bilingual education when its enrollment of limited English proficient (LEP) students in a particular elementary grade and language is twenty or higher. Using school panel data, we find a significant increase in the probability that a district offers bilingual education above this 20-student cutoff. Using this discontinuity as an instrument for district bilingual education provision, we find that bilingual education programs do not significantly impact the standardized test scores of students with Spanish as their home language (comprised primarily of ever-LEP students). However, there are significant positive spillover effects to their non-LEP peers.
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Thurston Domina & Joshua Saldana
American Educational Research Journal, August 2012, Pages 685-708
Abstract:
Over the past three decades, American high school students' course taking has rapidly intensified. Between 1982 and 2004, for example, the proportion of high school graduates who earned credit in precalculus or calculus more than tripled. In this article, the authors investigate the consequences of mathematics curricular intensification for social stratification in American high schools. Using representative data from U.S. high school graduates in 1982, 1992, and 2004, the authors estimate changes in race-, class-, and skills-based inequality in advanced math course credit completion. Their analyses indicate that race, class, and skills gaps in geometry, Algebra II, and trigonometry completion have narrowed considerably over the study period. However, consistent with the theory of maximally maintained inequality, inequalities in calculus completion remain pronounced.
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The Case Of State Funded Higher Education Scholarship Plans And Interstate Brain Drain
Zackary Hawley & Jonathan Rork
Regional Science and Urban Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper studies the impact of state funded higher education scholarship plans on interstate migration patterns of college educated individuals between 1980 and 2009. We find these plans increase the in-state enrollment rate, but have no positive impact on the subsequent number of graduates. While aggregate migration trends remain unaffected as a result of these plans, we find the out-migration rate of young college educated individuals decreases 3 to 5 years after the adoption of a plan, but this effect is countered by an increase in the out-migration of older college educated adults in later years.
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Judith Harackiewicz et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The pipeline toward careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) begins to leak in high school, when some students choose not to take advanced mathematics and science courses. We conducted a field experiment testing whether a theory-based intervention that was designed to help parents convey the importance of mathematics and science courses to their high school-aged children would lead them to take more mathematics and science courses in high school. The three-part intervention consisted of two brochures mailed to parents and a Web site, all highlighting the usefulness of STEM courses. This relatively simple intervention led students whose parents were in the experimental group to take, on average, nearly one semester more of science and mathematics in the last 2 years of high school, compared with the control group. Parents are an untapped resource for increasing STEM motivation in adolescents, and the results demonstrate that motivational theory can be applied to this important pipeline problem.
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Teacher Quality and Quality Teaching: Examining the Relationship of a Teacher Assessment to Practice
Heather Hill et al.
American Journal of Education, August 2012, Pages 489-519
Abstract:
Multiple-choice assessments are frequently used for gauging teacher quality. However, research seldom examines whether results from such assessments generalize to practice. To illuminate this issue, we compare teacher performance on a mathematics assessment, during mathematics instruction, and by student performance on a state assessment. Poor performance on the written assessment predicted poor classroom performance; likewise, strong performance on the written assessment predicted strong classroom performance. However, classroom performance of teachers in the middle of the written assessment distribution varied considerably. These results also held true using student outcomes as a criterion, leading to implications for both research and policy.
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Katharine Strunk, Andrew McEachin & Theresa Westover
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, forthcoming
Abstract:
The theory of action upon which high-stakes accountability policies are based calls for systemic reforms in educational systems that will emerge by pairing incentives for improvement with extensive and targeted technical assistance (TA) to build the capacity of low-performing schools and districts. To this end, a little discussed and often overlooked aspect of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) mandated that, in addition to sanctions, states were required to provide TA to build the capacity of struggling schools and Local Education Agencies (LEAs, or districts) to help them improve student achievement. Although every state in the country provides some form of TA to its lowest performing districts, we know little about the content of these programs or about their efficacy in improving student performance. In this paper, we use both quantitative and qualitative analyses to explore the actions taken by TA providers in one state - California - and examine whether the TA and support tied to California's NCLB sanctions succeeds in improving student achievement. Like many other states, California requires that districts labeled as persistently failing under NCLB (in Program Improvement year 3, PI3) work with external experts to help them build the capacity to make reforms that will improve student achievement. California's lowest performing PI3 districts are given substantial amounts of funding and are required to contract with state-approved District Assistance and Intervention Teams (DAITs), whereas the remaining PI3 districts receive less funding and are asked to access less intensive TA from non-DAIT providers. We use a five-year panel difference-in-difference design to estimate the impacts of DAITs on student performance on the math and English language arts (ELA) standardized tests relative to non-DAIT TA during the two years of the program intervention. We find that students in districts with DAITs perform significantly better on math California Standards Tests (CSTs) averaged over both treatment years and in each of the first and second years. We do not find evidence that students in districts with DAITs perform higher on ELA CSTs over the combined two years of treatment, although we find suggestive evidence that ELA performance increases in the second year of treatment relative to students in districts with non-DAIT TA. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions that explore the association between specific activities fostered by DAITs and changes in districts' gains in achievement over the two years of treatment show that DAIT districts that report increasing their focus on using data to guide instruction, shifting district culture to generate and maintain high expectations of students and staff, and increasing within-district accountability for student performance, have higher math achievement gains over the course of the DAIT treatment. In addition, DAIT districts that increase their focus on ELA instruction and shift district culture to one of high expectations have higher ELA achievement gains than do DAIT districts that do not have a similar focus.
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The Effect of Village-Based Schools: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial in Afghanistan
Dana Burde & Leigh Linden
NBER Working Paper, May 2012
Abstract:
We conduct a randomized evaluation of the effect of village-based schools on children's academic performance using a sample of 31 villages and 1,490 children in rural northwestern Afghanistan. The program significantly increases enrollment and test scores among all children, eliminates the 21 percentage point gender disparity in enrollment, and dramatically reduces the disparity in test scores. The intervention increases formal school enrollment by 42 percentage points among all children and increases test scores by 0.51 standard deviations (1.2 standard deviations for children that enroll in school). While all students benefit, the effects accrue disproportionately to girls. Evidence suggests that the village-based schools provide a comparable education to traditional schools. Estimating the effects of distance on academic outcomes, children prove very sensitive: enrollment and test scores fall by 16 percentage points and 0.19 standard deviations per mile. Distance affects girls more than boys - girls' enrollment falls by 6 percentage points more per mile (19 percentage points total per mile) and their test scores fall by an additional 0.09 standard deviations (0.24 standard deviations total per mile).
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Welfare Effects of Privatizing Public Education When Human Capital Investments Are Risky
Fabian Kindermann
Journal of Human Capital, Summer 2012, Pages 87-123
Abstract:
In an overlapping-generations model with risky human capital investment, borrowing constraints, and intergenerational transmission of abilities, I examine the effects of a change from publicly to privately funded college education. I find that from this reform, college graduates are better off compared to other workers since the college wage premium increases by around 50 percent. The reform deteriorates aggregate efficiency by (i) enforcing liquidity constraints, (ii) abolishing public insurance provision against educational risk, and (iii) increasing utility costs of college education via intergenerational spillovers. A success-dependent student loan system can offset efficiency losses but fails to generate efficiency gains.
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Every Child Matters? An Evaluation of "Special Educational Needs" Programmes in England
Francois Keslair, Eric Maurin & Sandra McNally
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
The need for education to help every child has become more important for policy in the US and the UK. Remedial programmes are often difficult to evaluate because participation is usually based on pupil characteristics that are largely unobservable to the analyst. We evaluate programmes for children with ‘special educational needs' in England. We show that the decentralized design of the policy generates much stronger differences across schools in access to remediation resources for children with moderate learning difficulties than for children with either no difficulties or severe difficulties. However, these differences are not reflected in subsequent educational attainment - suggesting that the programme is ineffective for children with moderate learning difficulties. Also, we use demographic variation within schools to consider the effect of the programme on whole year groups. Our analysis is consistent with no overall effect on account of the combined direct and indirect (spillover) effects.
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Comparing New School Effects in Charter and Traditional Public Schools
Andrew Kelly & Tom Loveless
American Journal of Education, August 2012, Pages 427-453
Abstract:
This study investigates whether student achievement varies during the institutional life span of charter schools by comparing them to new public schools. The results show that there is little evidence that new public schools struggle with initial start-up issues to the same extent as new charter schools. Even after controlling for school characteristics, new public schools generally perform about as well as one would predict given their demographic and socioeconomic profile. New public schools hit the ground running and maintain steady performance, while new charter schools begin to improve after their first year and slowly close the gap. Other studies have found that new charter schools are susceptible to what we label a "new school effect," where performance starts off low and then declines or remains stagnant during the first few years of operation. We find little evidence of this pattern for either new charter or new public schools.
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David Zarifa
Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, forthcoming
Abstract:
In an era of expanding postsecondary markets and heightened student and institutional competition, students' field of study decisions may be becoming an increasingly important point of differentiation in the process of social mobility. Drawing on the two most recent cohorts of the Baccalaureate and Beyond and National Graduates Surveys, this paper examines and compares field of study choices among American and Canadian baccalaureate degree-holders. Consistent with existing research, gender remains an important and consistent predictor of field of study choices. In Canada, the analyses show some evidence that the gender gap for business and management is shrinking, but the engineering and mathematics gap remains significant. In the U.S. the situation was reversed, as the engineering gap shrunk and the business and management gap did not change across cohorts. Moderate family background effects, strong and consistent academic ability effects and growing academic aspiration effects were found across most analyses, lending support to theories that predict family background has direct and indirect effects on higher education choices.
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Social identity and schooling inequality
Edward Nissan & George Carter
Journal of Economics and Finance, January 2012, Pages 190-200
Abstract:
The focus of this paper is to evaluate similarities and differences between and within socio-economic samples of school attendance. Eight variables broadly classified by income, education, family background, and class size, are employed for this purpose. For each of the eight variables, the null hypothesis is that the means by various classifications (income, mother's schooling, father's schooling, math score, language score, 4th grade class size, number of 4th grade classes, 4th grade enrollment) are equal against an alternative hypothesis that at least one of the member group differs. The method employed for this purpose is one-way analysis of variance. In each of the classifications, samples were divided to reflect public schools, voucher private schools and unsubsidized private schools as well as the full sample. Furthermore, the full samples are employed to find whether differences between the three groups exist for the eight variables. The full sample is n = 3,776 schools. The results point to statistical significant differences for all of the variables.
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Strategic Pay Reform: A Student Outcomes-Based Evaluation of Denver's ProComp Teacher Pay Initiative
Dan Goldhaber & Joe Walch
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Denver Public Schools utilizes one of the nation's highest profile alternative teacher compensation systems, and a key element of Denver's Professional Compensation System for Teachers (ProComp) system is pay for performance. This study analyzes the student achievement implications of ProComp utilizing matched student- and teacher-level data from 2003-2010. We find that student achievement increased during the years ProComp was implemented, but that these gains were observed for students taught by teachers enrolled in ProComp's alternative compensation system as well as non-participating teachers. While the findings are not consistent across grades and subjects, there is some evidence that teachers voluntarily opting into ProComp are more effective than those who do not volunteer. Finally, some ProComp bonuses were well targeted towards value-added measures of teacher effectiveness while others were not
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Does it pay to get an A? School resource allocations in response to accountability ratings
Steven Craig, Scott Imberman & Adam Perdue
Journal of Urban Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines public school district budgetary responses to school accountability ratings. We identify school district budgetary changes through a "rating shock" due to a major change in school accountability systems in Texas. Texas implemented a new accountability system and new exam, and allowed schools a "gap" year to adjust to the new test. Using the new Texas exam as an exogenous change, we find a 1.5% increase in instructional budgets, mainly for teachers, as a response to a drop in rating. This increase is found to disappear within three years, suggesting temporary budget support to "learn" the new system but no long run institutional change.
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The Effects of Home Access to Technology on Computer Skills: Evidence from a Field Experiment
Robert Fairlie
Information Economics and Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Computer skills are important for educational and labor market success. This paper examines whether disparities in access to home computers are limiting the acquisition of computer skills. To address problems with selection bias, I use data from a randomized field experiment providing free computers for home use to community college students. I find that the treatment group of low-income students receiving free computers has significantly higher levels of computer skills than the control group of low-income students not receiving free computers. The "intent-to-treat" estimates indicate an increase in high-level computer skills of 17 percentage points, and the LATE estimates indicate a range of 19 to 23 percentage points. The results are robust to estimation strategy, measurement of the dependent variable, and inclusion of different sets of controls. The benefits appear to be the strongest among young, minority, low-income, and female students.