Management Sciences and Quantitative Methods Commons^™

Who Takes Advanced Placement?, Benjamin Scafidi, Chris Clark, John Swinton

Faculty and Research Publications

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in the sources of achievement gaps between groups of students. One potential source is differential access to high quality educational opportunities. This paper provides an analysis of who takes Advanced Placement (AP) Economics. Using two years of administrative data on all high school students who take a course to satisfy Georgia’s graduation requirement in economics, we find large differences in enrollment in AP Economics across groups. Specifically, African-American and Hispanic students and students from low-income backgrounds are about half as likely to be enrolled in AP Economics as other students. However, …