At first glance, a program launched last week that will provide college scholarships for up to 2,600 current ninth-graders attending public schools in Milwaukee looks similar to a growing number of initiatives across the country designed to give students the boost they need to pursue a college degree. But The Degree Project is different in one significant way: It was built from the ground up as a research project to collect data and to examine whether these so-called promise programs are a wise use of funds in an era of limited resources.
“What we want to look at is if there is clear evidence that these programs work,” says Douglas Harris, a UW-Madison associate professor of educational policy studies who helped design the project and is its evaluator.