Bridging the Gap to Access? Impact of Pre-Collegiate Summer Program on College Outcomes

U.S. colleges face persistent inequities—not only in who enrolls, but in who ultimately graduates. While institutions have expanded efforts to diversify incoming classes, students from historically underserved backgrounds, including those who are first-generation and economically disadvantaged, continue to face several barriers that affect their rate of degree completion. This paper evaluates the causal impact of a bridge program called Bridge Scholars Program (BSP), an eight-week pre-collegiate summer initiative at a large public land grant university designed to support such students in their transition to college. Leveraging a fuzzy regression discontinuity design within a local randomization inference framework, highlighting its value for credible causal inference in settings with limited effective sample sizes near the cutoff, I find that BSP substantially improves first-year completion and second-year persistence. While participants receive a $2,500 annual scholarship, comparative analyses of similar financial aid programs suggest that the bundled nature of BSP—including structured summer programming, academic mentoring, and peer support—is central to its effectiveness. These findings underscore the importance of holistic interventions that address both financial and non-financial barriers to student success.