Impacts of College Board’s RYCP Campaign on Postsecondary Enrollment

Abstract

The College Board sought to reduce barriers in the college application process by minimizing information aggregation costs, encouraging a broad application portfolio, and providing an impetus to start the search process. Some students were offered additional encouragements, such as text message reminders or college application fee waivers. In a randomized control trial with 785,000 low-and middle-income students in the top 50% of the PSAT and SAT distributions, we find no changes in college enrollment patterns, with the exception of a 0.02σ increase in college quality measures for African-American and Hispanic students.

Rural postsecondary encouragement through a land grant university county extension office

“…Taking the intervening steps like admissions testing and financial aid in a timely manner are predictors of college enrollment but are susceptible to student inertia or small barriers like not knowing how to pay for the test. The results nationally on the effectiveness of simple reminders or nudges are mixed (Gurantz et al, 2019;Hoxby & Turner, 2013), but in this instance the nudges are coming from their known counselor rather than an anonymous third party and it was working. This difference between a third-party nudge and providing structure for the counselor to nudge and the results here may be an important distinction that merits further research.…”

“…Financial interventions that guide students and families in timely FAFSA applications are associated with college going and completion (Bettinger et al, 2012), but only providing additional financial aid information did not make a statistically significant change in behavior (Gurantz et al, 2019). Two studies found providing students with more information and guidance improved applications (Dynarski et al, 2021;Hoxby & Turner, 2013).…”

Can Information and Advising Affect Postsecondary Participation and Attainment for Non-Traditional Students? Evidence from a Large-Scale Experiment with the U.S. Army

“…Avery, Castleman, Hurwitz, Long, and Page, 2022;Bergman, Day, and Manoli, 2019;Bird, Castleman, Denning, Goodman, Lamberton, and Rosinger, 2021;Page, Sacerdote, Goldrick-Rab, and Castleman, 2021) or they are targeted at populations without significant undermatch (e.g. Sullivan, Castleman, Lohner, andBettinger, 2021, Gurantz, Howell, Hurwitz, Larson, Pender, andWhite, 2019;Gurantz, Pender, Mabel, Larson, and Bettinger, 2019).…”

Nudges Don't Work When the Benefits Are Ambiguous: Evidence from a High‐Stakes Education Program

“…In postsecondary education, numerous recent papers have reported on researchers’ efforts to scale to state‐ or national‐level messaging campaigns that demonstrated positive impacts in prior randomized trials (Avery et al., 2019; Bergman, Denning, & Manoli, 2019; Bird et al., 2019; Gurantz et al., 2020; Oreopoulos & Petronijevic, 2019; Page, Castleman, & Meyer, 2019). For instance, Bergman, Denning, and Manoli (2019) implemented a statewide e‐mail campaign in Texas to inform students about tax benefits associated with college enrollment.…”

“…Gurantz et al. (2020) investigate the impact of sending hundreds of thousands of students who took the PSAT or SAT personalized college list and fee waivers. Each of these large‐scale studies drew on evidence from similar, rigorously evaluated strategies that were demonstrated to be effective on smaller, often local, scales.…”