Abstract Summary/Description
We study the effects of North Carolina's Advanced Placement (AP) exam fee waivers on AP course enrollment, exam taking, and exam performance. Using course-level administrative data and exploiting within student variation, we identify the causal effects while overcoming several limitations of prior research. We find no evidence that fee waivers increased AP enrollment. However, fee waivers increased the likelihood of an AP course leading to an exam by 4 percentage points and had no significant negative impact on pass rate. The gains were large among historically underperforming (non-White and non-Asian) and economically disadvantaged students, reducing the racial and socioeconomic gap in AP exam participation by one-third. A back-of-the-envelope cost-benefit analyses show that the intervention was highly cost-effective, especially for the economically disadvantaged and historically underperforming groups.
