The authors thank Brent Evans, Eric Taylor, and Jon Valant for helpful comments. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

We were led to this title word analysis graphically, by noting lecture outliers-some videos were watched multiple times by individual students, while others were watched by very few students. Preliminary analyses indicated that these outliers were potentially explained by the lecture titles-some indicated that they contained information on assignments and exercises, others were labeled optional. This led us to the conclusion that students were sensitive to word choice in lecture titles. We created the list of words to check by scraping all lecture titles from our data set and parsing these strings on spaces. We counted how many instances of each word we had and considered all words that appeared more than 20 times across all lectures. We eliminated words that were not meaningful (i.e.

No abstract

College graduation rates often lag behind college attendance rates. One theory as to why students do not complete college is that they lack key information about how to be successful or fail to act on the information that they have. We present evidence from a randomized experiment which tests the effectiveness of individualized student coaching. Over the course of two separate school years, InsideTrack, a student coaching service, provided coaching to students attending public, private, and proprietary universities. Most of the participating students were nontraditional college students enrolled in degree programs. The participating universities and InsideTrack randomly assigned students to be coached. The coach contacted students regularly to develop a clear vision of their goals, to guide them in connecting their daily activities to their long-term goals, and to support them in building skills, including time management, self-advocacy, and study skills. Students who were randomly assigned to a coach were more likely to persist during the treatment period and were more likely to be attending the university 1 year after the coaching had ended. Coaching also proved a more cost-effective method of achieving retention and completion gains when compared with previously studied interventions such as increased financial aid.

No abstract