Beyond the enrolment gap: Financial barriers and high-achieving, low-income students' persistence in higher education

High-achieving, low-income students enrol in and graduate from higher education at lower rates than their high-income peers. While much work has focused on understanding their enrolment decision (extensive margin), less is known about what influences their persistence (intensive margin). This paper investigates whether credit constraints play a dominant role for the latter. Using exhaustive administrative data for France and a regression discontinuity design, I estimate the impact of automatically granting generous additional aid to enrolled high-achieving, low-income students. Eligibility is communicated too late to affect initial enrolment, allowing me to recover the pure effect on the intensive margin. I find this aid had precisely estimated null effects on persistence, graduation, and enrolment in graduate school, and did not induce switches to higher quality degrees. This suggests non-financial factors explain much of these students' observed attrition over time.