Information Barriers, Social Inequality, and Plans for Higher Education: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Abstract

Our article assesses the role of information barriers for patterns of educational participation and related social inequalities in plans for Higher Education (HE). Using longitudinal data, we investigate student expectations about the profitability of HE, their evolution over time and their correlation with study plans among Italian high school seniors. We find that student believes are highly inaccurate, systematically biased and poorly updated. Then, we present estimates of the causal effect of information barriers on educational plans based on a large-scale clustered randomized experiment. We designed a counseling intervention to correct student misperceptions of the profitability of HE and assessed whether treated students' plans changed differentially relative to a control group. The intervention was quite effective in correcting student misperceptions, but this did not translate into increased intentions to enroll in university education. However, the treatment affected preferences between fields of study, between short and long university paths, and between university and vocationally oriented programs. Hence, information barriers affect substantially the internal differentiation of HE and the related horizontal inequalities by gender and family background.

Inequality of Educational Opportunity in East and West Germany: Convergence or Continued Differences

“…In several experimental designs, an information deficit of students from lower social backgrounds has been identified as decisive in choosing lower educational tracks (Barone et al 2017;Ehlert et al 2017;Oreopoulos and Dunn 2013).…”

Information barriers and social stratification in higher education: evidence from a field experiment

“…Moreover, we expect that the informal circulation of information about university education and its functioning is hindered in countries with a low presence of tertiary graduates, as is the case of Italy (OECD ). Indeed, two recent studies report that Italian students have a poor knowledge of the system of HE (Abbiati and Barone ; Barone, Schizzerotto, Abbiati and Argentin ). On the one hand, they overestimate university costs considerably and have limited awareness of financial aid opportunities, in line with findings reported for other Western countries (Grodsky and Jones ).…”

“…McGuigan et al ; Usher ) and probably reflects the comparatively poor labour market prospects of university degrees in Italy (OECD ). Moreover, students display limited awareness of the marked differences between fields in terms of occupational opportunities, and limited knowledge of existing postsecondary vocational alternatives to university (Barone et al ). Overall, it is apparent that students have a hard time grasping the career implications of the internal differentiation of HE.…”

“…A previous study by Barone et al () has already analysed the impact of the treatment on student beliefs and study plans (wave 2), showing that the treatment has substantially improved student knowledge of the economic costs and occupational benefits of tertiary programmes. Moreover, this study documented that this experiment has high internal and external validity: (1) only four sampled schools refused to participate in the study and they were easily replaced; (2) the student cumulative response rate at wave 3 was 82 per cent and it was perfectly balanced between treated and control students; (3) the two groups of students were statistically equivalent along a large number of variables before the treatment, thus suggesting that the randomization worked well; (4) treatment fidelity was high: 90.2 per cent of the students participated in at least two meetings; (5) there was no evidence of contamination between treated and control students .…”

Explaining Native‐Migrant Differences in Parental Knowledge about the German Educational System

“…This importance of information in the domain of education is also reflected in the vast amount of research on information effects conducted in recent years. Numerous studies have investigated the impact of information on education‐related behaviour, documenting its positive effects on college enrolment (Bettinger et al., ; Loyalka et al., ; Castleman and Page, ), school attendance (Nguyen, ; Dinkelman and Martínez, ), the intention to acquire higher education (Oreopoulos and Dunn, ), the intended field and length of study (Barone et al., ) and aspirations (see Relikowski et al., ; Scott‐Clayton, ; Page and Scott‐Clayton, and Peter and Zambre, for reviews).…”