Impacts of Large School Grants and Admissions Algorithms on Student Achievement and Admissions Diversity: Evidence from High-Performing Kenyan Secondary Schools

Abstract School grants are a logistically simple intervention that aim to improve education outcomes by empowering school administrators to target spending. This paper studies whether a school upgrade program that provided particularly large school grants—an order of magnitude larger than other grant programs studied in developing countries—paired with flexibility to charge higher fees, improved student educational outcomes, as measured by student examination results. The program impact is identified by comparing student outcomes at upgraded schools to student outcomes at schools that met the government’s upgrade eligibility criteria, but were not selected for the upgrade program. I examine cohorts enrolled in the schools prior to the upgrade announcements to avoid potential composition changes resulting from the program. Using this difference-in-differences approach, I find that the program significantly improved outcomes for boys enrolled in the the newly-upgraded schools by 0.17 standard deviations, boosted the likelihood that they scored above a preferential university admissions threshold by 8 percentage points and that the new admissions mechanism admitted comparably-achieving but more geographically diverse students.