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.

Applying to college: Do information deficits lower the likelihood of college-eligible students from less-privileged families to pursue their college intentions?

“…Some recent experimental studies for the Anglo-Saxon context confirm the survey results and show that correct financial information is associated with a higher stability of college intentions (e.g., McGuigan et al 2012;Oreopoulos and Dunn 2013). In contrast, for the Italian context, Barone et al (2016) do not find an effect of unbiased information on students' stability in college intentions.…”

“…The U.S. context, however, is characterized by high study costs and high returns to higher education-therefore, financial information might be an important source for application decisions. In contrast, a recent study on Italy, where costs of and returns to higher education are lower, finds that providing correct and unbiased information did not influence students' college intentions in their final high school year (Barone et al 2016). 3 They did not study students' educational decisions, like applications.…”

“…On the one hand, these deficits may be particularly important for lessprivileged students because they are often concerned about the financial costs of attending college (Morgan 2010, p. 212; see also Engle 2007;Erikson and Jonsson 1996;Hoxby and Turner 2013). On the other hand, even if they have comprehensive and correct information, lack of economic resources and parental support may be the major barriers preventing them from pursuing their college plans (e.g., Barone 2016). Yet, there is some evidence for the U.S. context that information deficits do matter (Berkner and Chavez 1997;Hoxby and Turner 2013;Vargas 2004).…”

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

“…The results presented in this work refer to this wave concerning the actual decisions of students. 6 A previous study by Barone et al (2017) 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, 2012;Loyalka et al, 2013;Castleman and Page, 2017), school attendance (Nguyen, 2008;Dinkelman and Mart ınez, 2014), the intention to acquire higher education (Oreopoulos and Dunn, 2013), the intended field and length of study (Barone et al, 2017) and aspirations (see Relikowski et al, 2012;Scott-Clayton, 2012;Page andScott-Clayton, 2016 andPeter andZambre, 2014 for reviews).…”