Universal Pre-K and College Enrollment: Is There a Link?

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Adam

Investigates whether Tulsa’s universal pre-K and Head Start participation predicts later college enrollment. The study uses data from 4,033 Tulsa kindergarten students and tests effects on enrollment in 2-year and 4-year colleges. Propensity score weighting with multiply imputed data estimates associations. Results show 12% higher college enrollment for Tulsa pre-K alumni versus non-participants, and 7.5% higher for Head Start alumni with marginal significance. Tulsa pre-K is linked to 2-year enrollment across groups and strongly to 4-year enrollment for Black and Hispanic students.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages17

Reading Time43 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Background and Rationale

Research Questions and Data

Study design and comparison groups

Methods

Propensity score weighting

Findings

Effects on 2-year and 4-year enrollment by subgroup

AERA Open January-December 2023, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 1–17 DOI: 10. 1177/23328584221147893 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)© The Author(s) 2023. [https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero](https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero) Universal Pre-K and College Enrollment: Is There a Link? William T. Gormley Jr. Georgetown University Sara Amadon Child Trends Katherine Magnuson University of Wisconsin-Madison Amy Claessens University of Wisconsin-Madison Douglas Hummel-Price Georgetown University In this study, we used data from a cohort of 4,033 Tulsa kindergarten students to investigate the relationship between pre-K enrollment and later college enrollment. Specifically, we tested whether participation in the Tulsa Public Schools universal pre-K program and the Tulsa Community Action Project (CAP) Head Start program predicted enrollment in 2-or 4-year colleges. We used propensity score weighting with multiply imputed data sets to estimate these associations. We found that college enrollment was 12 percentage points higher for Tulsa pre-K alumni compared with former students who did not attend Tulsa pre-K or Head Start. College enrollment was 7.5 percentage points higher for Head Start alumni compared to former students who did not attend Head Start or Tulsa pre-K, but this difference was only marginally significant. Tulsa pre-K attendance was associated with 2-year college enrollment among students from all racial and ethnic backgrounds, but only among Black and Hispanic students did it strongly predict 4-year college enrollment. Keywords: child development, early childhood, econometric analysis, higher education Developmental science has demonstrated the importance of early childhood experiences in creating a strong foundation for later learning (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000) . Given the importance of the early years and the high cost of early childhood education (ECE) to parents, many state and local governments have created public pre-kindergarten (pre-K) programs. By increasing access to ECE, which provides developmentally appropriate learning opportunities, pre-K programs are intended to improve the school readiness of 3-and 4-year-old children. The short-term efficacy of these programs has been demonstrated by many studies, using a variety of research designs (Yoshikawa et al., 2013) . Yet there have been few longitudinal studies of pre-K programs’ lasting impacts beyond the elementary school years. In particular, there is scant evidence on whether at-scale public programs increase later educational attainment, including postsecondary education. In this paper, we investigate whether attending a wellestablished, high-quality universal pre-K (UPK) program in Tulsa, Oklahoma, predicted college enrollment. We asked two key questions: First, were students who participated in Tulsa’s public ECE programs (school-based pre-K or Head Start) more likely to attend college compared with similar students who did not attend these ECE programs? Second, if Tulsa’s ECE programs were linked to college enrollment, were these associations found among students of differing socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds? We answered these questions by using data for students who attended kindergarten in Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) in the fall of 2006, including ECE alumni and non-alumni. Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License ([https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages ([https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage](https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-

FAQs

What relationship does the study examine between pre-K and college enrollment?

The study evaluates whether participation in Tulsa universal pre-K and Head Start predicts later enrollment in 2-year or 4-year colleges.

What data and analytical method were used?

It uses a cohort of 4,033 Tulsa kindergarten students and applies propensity score weighting with multiply imputed data sets to estimate the associations.

How do the results differ between Tulsa pre-K and Head Start?

College enrollment is 12 percentage points higher for Tulsa pre-K alumni, while Head Start alumni show a 7.5 percentage point higher enrollment difference that is only marginally significant.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Adam