New York City’s Small Schools of Choice (SSCs) were created as part of the city’s Children First Initiative to redesign students’ high school experiences and increase high school graduation rates for stu­dents from low-income backgrounds who historically had limited access to personalized academic instruction. SSCs typically serve approx­imately 100 students per grade and emphasize academic rigor, the real-world relevance of learning, and personalized relationships between teachers and their students. Since 2010, MDRC researchers have used the lotteries within New York City’s high school assignment process to rigor­ously study the effects of SSCs on students and have consistently found large, positive impacts on high school graduation rates, produced year after year and at no additional cost per graduate.

The positive findings on students’ high school outcomes have helped provide a road map for practitioners looking to transform their city’s high school landscape and increase high school completion. The purpose of this brief is to explore whether students’ enrollment in SSCs continues to help them advance as they move into postsecondary education and the labor market. Toward this end, the project’s rich longitudinal database pro­vides a unique opportunity to study students who applied to attend an SSC in the 2005-2006, 2006-2007, 2007-2008, and 2008-2009 academic years. Researchers followed these students for six years after their anticipated high school graduation and measured SSC effects on their enrollment in postsecondary education, their postsecondary degree attainment, and their future employment and earnings—overall and by key student subgroups.

On average, ninth-grade enrollment in an SSC, instead of another type of New York City high school, produced the following effects:

• Large, positive effects (of 9.5 percentage points) on students’ enrollment in postsecondary educa­tion immediately after graduating from high school.
   
• Small to moderate, positive effects (of 2.5 percentage points) on students’ four-year postsecondary degree attainment rate.
   
• Some variation in effects across students, such as larger increases in postsecondary enrollment and degree attainment rates among students who were already proficient in math before enter­ing high school.
   
• No effect on students’ employment rates or earnings, despite increased rates of enrollment in postsecondary education.