The Remarkable Unresponsiveness of College Students to Nudging And What We Can Learn from It

Abstract

Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.

Scaling up behavioral science interventions in online education

“…Our finding that plan-making interventions have limited benefits provides further evidence that behavioral insights have more promise in encouraging one-time, short-lived actions than more continuous behaviors that require sustained effort and habit change. These conclusions are consistent with a number of recent scale-up studies in other domains that have found diminished scope and magnitude for behavioral interventions (23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)32).…”

“…Overall, we did not find new evidence for our original large-to mediumsized effects. Specifically, the long-term planning prompts did A number of recent scale-up studies have failed to find effects of similar magnitude as the original studies, raising questions about whether the original effect estimates generalized beyond the original populations and contexts (23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29). Although our initial results were disappointing, our study was designed for multiple opportunities to preregister, test, explore, and then register and test updated hypotheses.…”

Evidence-based policies, nudge theory and Nancy Cartwright: a search for causal principles

“…The same intervention (text message) did not work to increase the number of future students completing FAFSA, a form for obtaining financial aid for college (Bird et al, 2019). Text messages also did not work to improve academic performance (Oreopoulos & Petronijevic, 2019). Why do text messages work in certain scenarios and not in others?…”

Advisor Value-Added and Student Outcomes: Evidence from Randomly Assigned College Advisors

“…In contrast, less is known about whether advising during college improves student outcomes and the existing evidence is mixed. Several studies find that access to advising has negligible impacts on college students' academic performance (Angrist, Lang and Oreopoulos, 2009;Scrivener and Weiss, 2009;Angrist, Oreopoulos and Williams, 2014;Oreopoulos and Petronijevic, 2019). On the other hand, some programs which offer personalized and proactive coaching or advising have shown to substantially increase academic performance (Kot, 2014;Oreopoulos and Petronijevic, 2019) and college persistence (Bettinger and Baker, 2014;Barr and Castleman, 2018).…”