High school exit exams are meant to standardize the quality of public high schools and to ensure that students graduate with a set of basic skills and knowledge. Evidence suggests that a common perverse effect of exit exams is an increase in dropout for students who have difficulty passing tests, with a larger effect on minority students. To mitigate this, some states offer alternative, non-tested pathways to graduation for students who have failed their exit exams. This study investigates the post-secondary effects of an alternative high school graduation program. Compared with similar students who fail to complete high school, those students who take the alternative pathway have better post-secondary outcomes in both education and employment. Compared with similar students who retake exit exams to graduate, those who eventually graduate through an alternative project-based pathway have lower college enrollment, but similar employment outcomes.

Text-message-based parenting programs have proven successful in improving parent engagement and preschoolers’ literacy development. This study seeks to identify mechanisms of the overall effect of such programs. It investigates whether actionable advice alone drives previous studies’ results and whether additional texts of actionable advice improve program effectiveness. The findings provide evidence that text messaging programs can supply too little or too much information. A single text per week is not as effective at improving parenting practices as a set of three texts that also include information and encouragement, but a set of five texts with additional actionable advice is also not as effective as the three-text approach. The results on children's literacy development depend on the child's pre-intervention literacy skills. For children in the lowest quarter of the pretreatment literacy assessments, providing one example of an activity improves literacy scores by 0.19 standard deviations less than providing three texts. Literacy scores of children in higher quarters are marginally higher with only one tip per week than with three tips per week. We find no positive effects of increasing to five texts per week.

Access to higher education begins with a student's decision whether and where to apply to college. This paper examines racial and ethnic differences in college application behavior of high school graduates, using two recent graduation cohorts from Texas. We estimate racial and ethnic differences in the probability of applying to college, controlling for a student's college readiness, high school quality, certainty of college admissions, and high school fixed effects. We then investigate racial and ethnic differences in the choice of where to apply. We enhance the typical model of college matching by considering the social setting and high school feeder patterns of state universities. We find that racial and ethnic gaps in application rates, particularly for Hispanic students, are not explained by differential levels of college readiness, high school quality, or information regarding college admission processes. When applying to college, minorities are influenced by more than just matching their academic ability to the institution, and prefer institutions with a large proportion of same-race students and campuses where same-race students from their high school have been successful in the past.