The Impact of Merit Aid on College Choice and Degree Attainment: Reexamining Florida’s Bright Futures Program

Oct 15, 2026

Replicating and extending prior research on Florida’s Bright Futures merit aid scholarship, the study estimates causal effects on college enrollment and degree completion. A regression discontinuity design exploits SAT thresholds that determine eligibility, and the analysis finds no positive impacts on attendance or attainment. Instrumental variable results generally reject small effect sizes of 1–2 percentage points, with subgroup findings showing eligibility slightly reduces 6-year associate degree attainment for lower-SES students and may shift Hispanic and White students’ enrollment toward four-year colleges.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages26

Reading Time1 h 6 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Data and Methodology

Results: Enrollment and Attainment

Subgroup Findings and Interpretation

Conclusion

Research Article Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis March 2022, Vol. 44, No. 1, pp. 79–104 DOI: 10. 3102/01623737211030489 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)© 2021 AERA. [https://journals.sagepub.com/home/epa](https://journals.sagepub.com/home/epa) The Impact of Merit Aid on College Choice and Degree Attainment: Reexamining Florida’s Bright Futures Program Oded Gurantz University of Missouri Taylor K. Odle University of Pennsylvania We replicate and extend prior work on Florida’s Bright Futures merit aid scholarship to consider its effect on college enrollment and degree completion. We estimate causal impacts using a regression discontinuity design to exploit SAT thresholds that strongly determine eligibility. We find no positive impacts on attendance or attainment, and instrumental variable results generally reject estimates as small as 1 to 2 percentage points. Across subgroups, we find that eligibility slightly reduces 6-year associate degree attainment for lower socioeconomic status students and may induce small enrollment shifts among Hispanic and White students toward 4-year colleges. Our findings of these minimal-at-best impacts contrast those of prior works, attributable in part to methodological improvements and more robust data, and further underscore the importance of study replication. Keywords: Bright Futures, college access and success, financial aid, merit aid, regression discontinuity, replication Financial aid has a causal impact on a variety of postsecondary outcomes, including college enrollment, degree completion, and labor market earnings (Bettinger et al., 2019; Denning et al., 2019; Nguyen et al., 2019) . The magnitude and direction of these effects largely vary by program design and delivery, with merit-based grant programs typically producing weaker effects on enrollment and completion than need-based programs (Domina, 2014; Dynarski & ScottClayton, 2013; Herbaut & Geven, 2020; Page & Scott-Clayton, 2016) . Within this body of evidence, a large portion has focused on the causal impacts of state merit aid. This interest is due in part to programs’ large public expenditures and also due to many states’ large-scale shifts from need to merit programs in the 1990s and early 2000s (Dynarski, 2004) . As of 2018, 23 states operated at least one merit aid program and spent nearly US$2.4 billion on merit awards (National Association of State Student Grant and Aid Programs, 2018) . Among those 2018 expenditures, nearly US$383 million came from Florida’s Bright Futures (BF) program (Florida Department of Education, 2018) . Although the preponderance of empirical evidence promotes need-based programs as producing stronger positive impacts than their merit-based counterparts (see Herbaut & Geven, 2020; Nguyen et al., 2019 for reviews), debate still exists among state policymakers regarding the costs and benefits of each form of aid, as many ask: For whom does aid “work” and on what margins? Although aid programs generally Gurantz and Odle produce positive effects, some have shown zero or even negative impacts, and repeated evaluations of even the same programs have produced conflicting results (e.g., Bettinger et al., 2019; Dynarski, 2008; Kane, 2003; Sjoquist & Winters, 2012) . In this light, study replication and extension help detect heterogeneous effects across program types and student groups while also adding new outcome measures and strengthening or correcting prior inferences (Granger & Maynard, 2015; Hedges, 2018) . In the policy arena, replications and extensions are particularly important to building a robust body of evidence for policymakers to consider the design and implementation of aid programs and to weigh investments of scarce state resources (Wong et al., 2021) . This study reexamines the effects of Florida’s BF merit aid program, previously studied by Zhang et a

FAQs

How does the study estimate the causal impact of Bright Futures merit aid?

It uses a regression discontinuity design leveraging SAT eligibility thresholds that strongly determine program eligibility.

What overall effects does eligibility for Bright Futures have on college attendance and degree completion?

The study generally finds no positive impacts on attendance or attainment, with results rejecting effect sizes as small as 1–2 percentage points.

Are there any subgroup effects related to associate degree attainment and student socioeconomic status?

Yes. Eligibility slightly reduces 6-year associate degree attainment for lower socioeconomic status students, with the effect concentrated among students in zip codes with lower SES.

Oct 15, 2026

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