encouraging more students to enter science and technology
fields, STEM high schools are purported to help
mitigate the outflow of females and minorities from STEM
education and careers. This push for STEM high schools,
however, has not been accompanied by rigorous research
supporting their effectiveness. Quite possibly, students in
STEM schools could have performed as well if they had
attended a Non-STEM school. For females and minorities,
while STEM schools might provide an opportunity to
‘‘catch-up’’ with the performance of males and whites
respectively, they might also foster environments in which
females, blacks and Hispanics feel out of place. As our
review of the previous literature makes clear, STEM
schools have been described as providing ‘‘chilly environments’’
to females and minorities. Therefore, whether
STEM schools can improve the size as well as the
composition of the STEM education pipeline is an empirical
question, which we aim to help answer in this paper.