In 2013, the North Carolina General Assembly tasked state education agencies with creating a centralized residency determination process that allows a third party to determine students' eligibility for in-state-resident tuition. This system, called the Residency Determination Service (RDS), supplanted the existing structure in which individual universities determined residency classification themselves. Now students applying to college in North Carolina must fill out an online residency application called the interview during which they must submit information about themselves and their parents or guardians. While this process was designed to ease the residency determination process at universities, prior literature on processes similar to the RDS indicate that the form could serve as a barrier to college access for underserved students. The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of the RDS on college access for North Carolinians seeking to attend an in-state, public two or four-year college. Using a difference-in-differences analytic approach and secondary data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education System, I sought to understand the effect of the RDS on enrollment volume at public two and four-year colleges in North Carolina overall, for residents and nonresidents, and for low-income, White, Black, and Latinx students. The dataset spanned academic years 2013-2014 through 2018-2019 with treatment defined in 2017. The treatment group for this study comprised both public two and four-year colleges in North Carolina. I constructed four control groups for my analyses: all qualifying two and four-year colleges in the United States (U.S.), all qualifying two and four-year colleges in geographically contiguous states, all qualifying two and four-year colleges in the southeastern region of the U.S., and a statistically derived group created with inverse probability weights. I found that the RDS had no impact on overall, resident, non-resident, and Latinx enrollment. I also found that the RDS negatively impacted enrollment for Black students and those receiving Pell grants at two-year colleges, but increased their enrollment at four-year colleges. Finally, my analyses revealed that the policy was associated with an increase in White enrollment at two-year colleges and a decrease in White enrollment at four-year colleges. While these results were statistically significant, the effect sizes were very small averaging five and 14 percent of a standard deviation at two and four-year colleges, respectively. Therefore, I conclude that the RDS did not have a substantive impact on enrollment in North Carolina. The results of this study not only inform future tuition residency policy in North Carolina but also inform the decision making of policymakers in other states who may attempt to adopt the RDS for use in their own higher education system. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]