Participation in Math Corps Increases College Enrollment
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Key Findings
- Math Corps students had much higher graduation rates than Detroit Public Schools.
- Math Corps had a large and statistically significant impact on college enrollment.
- Few Math Corps participants had encounters with the criminal justice system.
Approximately 30 years ago, Steven Kahn and Leonard Boehm at Wayne State University (WSU) started Math Corps, a summer camp for middle school students who could benefit from mentoring and positive influences. Their primary goal for the camp was to support the emotional and social needs of the students in Detroit; accordingly, the educators leveraged their backgrounds as math teachers to create an intensive summer program that provides not only that emotional and social support, but also high-quality math instruction.
In 2015, the National Science Foundation awarded WSU an Advancing Informal Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Learning grant. As part of the grant, Mathematica con-ducted an independent study of Math Corps using a quasi-experimental retrospective analysis focusing on long-term outcomes for students who attended Math Corps from 2004 to 2009. This brief presents the results of those analyses, which provide rigorous evidence of the impact of the Math Corps summer program on college enrollment, degree completion, and encounters with the criminal justice system.
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