Abstract:
The Michigan Merit Curriculum (MMC) was a college-preparatory curriculum that the State of Michigan required of all high school graduates. A precursor to the Common Core, the MMC was first implemented on the 8th grade cohort of the 2006-2007 academic year. I study how post-secondary outcomes change when this STEM-focused curricular reform was put in place. I show that there was a marked increase in college attendance, especially among 4-year colleges, in treated cohorts. Under the MMC, community college students took substantially more STEM coursework, and performed better across all fields, but these gains are not observed among students at 4-year schools. In fact, 4 year students perform significantly worse after the MMC, which I argue is a compositional effect of the policy.