Harvard University Study of Arizona Scholarship Tax Credit

Abstract

In 2009, the East Valley Tribune and the Arizona Republic alleged that Arizona’s individual income tax-credit scholarship program is proportionately serves privileged students from higher income families over those from lower-income backgrounds. Yet neither paper collected the student-level, scholarship recipient family income data needed to verify their allegation.

This analysis does by using family income and related data provided by school tuition organizations (STOs) for 19,990 individual income tax-credit scholarship recipients, representing almost 80 percent (79.4 percent) of all scholarship recipients in 2009. These student-level data show there is no factual basis for claims that the individual income tax-credit scholarship program fails to help poor and lower-income students.

This analysis finds that scholarship recipients’ median family income was almost $5,000 lower than the U.S. Census Bureau statewide median annual income. It was also almost $5,000 lower than the median incomes in recipients’ neighborhoods, as estimated using student addresses and zip codes. More than two-thirds (66.8 percent) of scholarship recipients’ family incomes would qualify them for Arizona’s means-tested corporate income tax-credit scholarship program, which is limited to $75,467 for a family of four.

Finally, a higher proportion of scholarship recipients come from families whose incomes qualify them as poor (at or below $20,050 for a family of four) than the U.S. Census Bureau statewide average, 12.8 percent compared to 10.2 percent.

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