IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/edfpol/v20y2025i1p1-32.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Advanced Placement Program and Educational Inequality

Author

Listed:
  • Stephanie Owen

    (Department of Economics Colby College Waterville, ME 04901)

Abstract

The Advanced Placement (AP) program is widely offered in American high schools and has been touted as a way to close racial and socioeconomic gaps in educational outcomes. Using administrative data from Michigan, I exploit variation within high schools across time in AP course offerings to identify the relationship between AP course availability, AP participation, and postsecondary outcomes. I find that students from non economically disadvantaged families, White and Asian students, and higher-achieving students are more likely to take advantage of additional AP courses when they are offered, thus widening existing gaps in course-taking. I find little evidence that additional AP availability is related to improved college outcomes for any students, with the exception of the most academically prepared students. Expanding access to AP courses without additional incentives or support for disadvantaged students to succeed is unlikely to address educational inequality.

Suggested Citation

  • Stephanie Owen, 2025. "The Advanced Placement Program and Educational Inequality," Education Finance and Policy, MIT Press, vol. 20(1), pages 1-32, Winter.
    • Handle: RePEc:tpr:edfpol:v:20:y:2025:i:1:p:1-32
    DOI: 10.1162/edfp_a_00424
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00424
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1162/edfp_a_00424?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tpr:edfpol:v:20:y:2025:i:1:p:1-32. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: The MIT Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://direct.mit.edu/journals .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.