Attending college improves opportunities, but gaining entrance is a challenge.

Research has demonstrated that a college education doesn’t just improve economic outcomes, it also improves people’s overall health. However, the path to college for underserved and low-income students is strewn with barriers, including under-resourced high schools that can’t prepare them for standardized tests as well as their more affluent peers.

Tutoring can help more students get admitted to college. 

To surmount the barrier, the College Board, creator of the SAT®, established a high-dose, virtual tutoring program designed to help low-income urban high school students in Chicago and New York City improve their SAT scores. The goal is to push student math scores over 450, a value commonly considered a threshold for college admission. The expectation is that having reached this score, more underserved students will have a better shot at higher education.

A rigorous evaluation will determine the program’s impact.

In partnership with the College Board, NORC developed a randomized control trial to study the impact of its tutoring program on approximately 500 low-income students in both cities. The study employed individual-level randomization to assess the impact of tutoring and measured the fidelity of implementation and cost-effectiveness of the program.