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.

我们复制并扩展了佛罗里达州光明未来奖学金的先前工作，以考虑其对大学入学和学位完成的影响。我们使用回归不连续性设计来估计因果影响，以利用强烈确定资格的 SAT 阈值。我们发现对出勤率或成就没有积极影响，工具变量结果通常拒绝小至 1 到 2 个百分点的估计。在各个亚组中，我们发现社会经济地位较低的学生获得资格会略微降低 6 年副学士学位的获得，并可能导致西班牙裔和白人学生向 4 年制大学的入学率发生小幅变化。我们对这些最低限度的影响的发现与先前工作的结果形成鲜明对比，部分归因于方法的改进和更可靠的数据，