The California Center for Population Research selected UCLA Graduate Student Huihuang Zhu as the 2024 recipient of the Treiman Fellowship. Huihuang’s project, “Evaluating the Equity and Efficiency Tradeoffs of Academic Tracking: Lessons from Advanced Placement,” uses event-study and differences-in-differences methodology and finds that the AP program had large effects on the likelihood that high-performing students matriculate in college and graduate with a bachelor’s degree. In the longer term, the AP program also improved the quality of college they attended and increased their annual earnings. Another fascinating part of the paper is that lower-performing students appear to benefit from high school AP programs as well, experiencing similar proportional increases in college matriculation and earnings.  One mechanism for these findings is that the AP program may allow teachers in non-AP classes to target their teaching more effectively. Although the paper finds that the introduction of AP leads to academic sorting, the results show no evidence of harms for any academic groups. Huihuang’s dissertation advisor in the economics department is Martha Bailey.