College chat

Peter Bergman, Teachers College, Columbia University

Can a few text messages, a timely email or a letter increase college enrollment and student achievement? Such “nudges,” designed carefully using behavioral economics, can be effective.

But when do they work – and when not?

Barriers to success

Consider students who have just graduated high school intending to enroll in college. Even among those who have been accepted to college, 15 percent of low-income students do not enroll by the next fall. For the large share who intend to enroll in community colleges, this number can be as high as 40 percent.

There are a number of possible reasons for this attrition: many families overestimate the cost of college because the sticker price of colleges can be much higher than the net price (the sticker price minus the potentially large amount of aid a low-income student could receive); students may struggle with complex financial aid forms; there may be a lack of support to guide them through the application process. So, even when low-income students who are high-achieving do enroll in college, the majority fail to enroll in a college that is comparable to their level of achievement.

Can a few text messages or a timely email overcome these barriers? My research uses behavioral economics to design low-cost, scalable interventions aimed at improving education outcomes. Behavioral economics suggests several important features to make a nudge effective: simplify complex information, make tasks easier to complete and ensure that support is timely.

So, what makes for an effective nudge?

Improving college enrollment

In 2012, researchers Ben Castleman and Lindsay Page sent 10 text messages to nearly 2,000 college-intending students the summer after high school graduation. These messages provided just-in-time reminders on key financial aid, housing and enrollment deadlines from early July to mid August.

Instead of set meetings with counselors, students could reply to messages and receive on-demand support from college guidance counselors to complete key tasks.

In another intervention – the Expanding College Opportunities Project (ECO) – researchers Caroline Hoxby and Sarah Turner worked to help high-achieving, low-income students enroll in colleges on par with their achievement. The intervention arrived to students as a packet in the mail.

The mailer simplified information by providing a list of colleges tailored to each student’s location along with information about net costs, graduation rates, and application deadlines. Moreover, the mailer included easy-to-claim application fee waivers. All these features reduced both the complexity and cost in applying to a wider range of colleges.

In both cases, researchers found that it significantly improved college outcomes. College enrollment went up by 15 percent in the intervention designed to reduce summer melt for community college students. The ECO project increased the likelihood of admission to a selective college by 78 percent.

Getting parents involved

Of course, it’s not just at college enrollment time that nudging can be helpful. Parents also face behavioral barriers while their children are in middle and high school. Many parents underestimate the number of assignments their child has not turned in as well as the number of school days their child has missed. Unfortunately, schools often do a poor job communicating this information to parents in a timely fashion.

I tested an intervention that sent text messages to parents about their child’s missed assignments and grades. The messages were frequent – sent four times more often than report cards – and provided detailed information to parents about their child’s missed assignments and grades. Each message listed page numbers and problems students needed to complete so that parents could track their child’s progress.

Parents responded by communicating with the school more often and motivating their children to do the work: students turned in 25 percent more assignments, which led to significant improvements in grades and evidence of increased math scores.

When there is no impact

While these interventions are promising, there are important caveats.

For instance, our preliminary findings from ongoing research show that information alone may not be enough. We sent emails and letters to more than one hundred thousand college applicants about financial aid and education-related tax benefits. However, we didn’t provide any additional support to help families through the process of claiming these benefits.

In other words, we didn’t provide any support to complete the tasks – no fee waivers, no connection to guidance counselors – just the email and the letter. Without this support to answer questions or help families complete forms to claim the benefits, we found no impact, even when students opened the emails.

More generally, “nudges” often lead to modest impacts and should be considered only a part of the solution. But there’s a dearth of low-cost, scalable interventions in education, and behavioral economics can help.

Identifying the crucial decision points – when applications are due, forms need to be filled out or school choices are made – and supplying the just-in-time support to families is key.

Peter Bergman, Assistant Professor of Economics and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

David H. Feldman, College of William & Mary and Robert B. Archibald, College of William & Mary

On July 6, Hillary Clinton took a half-step toward Bernie Sanders’ free public college tuition plan. She proposed partnering with states to zero out tuition by 2020 for families making US$125,000 or less.

We know that American higher education faces serious long-term problems. However, reducing tuition or college debt to zero isn’t the right way to solve them.

We have been studying America’s higher education system and college costs. Our research tells us that the deep problems in American higher education today aren’t due to the fact that students borrow or pay tuition. It is because the schools serving the bulk of America’s underprivileged students are increasingly resource-starved.

So, what should our candidates be worrying about when it comes to higher education? And what policies might make a dent in our real problems?

Inequality in higher education

Let’s first look at how higher education has been split into separate and unequal worlds.

As researchers Caroline Hoxby and Sarah Turner have shown, students who attend a college ranked “most competitive” by Barron’s, a financial magazine, enjoy $27,000 of instructional spending per student. These include schools such as Yale, Duke, Kenyon and the University of Miami. At a “non-selective” four-year university that number drops to $5,000. This group includes many non-flagship state universities and small liberal arts colleges that accept most applicants.

The divide is further deepened as only a small percentage of low-income students are able to attend top universities. Only four percent of the students who attend the institutions rated as “most competitive” are from the bottom quarter of the socioeconomic status distribution. Students from the bottom half of the income distribution cluster at community colleges and non-selective four-year institutions.

Rising income inequality and declining state support for higher education further risks cementing in place this division between first class and steerage class education.

Rising inequality, declining state support

Consider the following facts: Most of the income growth since 1965 has gone to the richest 20 percent of American households. Since 2000, a household at the bottom fifth has lost $3,200, measured in 2014 dollars, or 13 percent of its income. But America’s richest five percent earns an extra $7,000.

For students from poor and middle-income families, stagnant or declining income is a real barrier to college access unless state or federal subsidies become more liberal.

But most states have cut funding to public universities. Between 2000-01 and 2014-15, annual state spending per full-time student fell by $2,573, measured in 2014 dollars. Over the same time period the annual tuition and fees paid by the average student at a public four-year university have risen by $2,038, also measured in 2014 dollars. Tuition increases have not fully recovered state cuts.

Despite tuition increases, public universities, and especially the less-selective non-flagships that serve the bulk of the population, are increasingly resource-starved.

Our calculations, based on data from the Delta Cost Project,which conducts research on how colleges spend their money, show the following: In 1987, public universities spent 88 cents for every dollar that private nonprofit institutions spent on the wages and salaries that drive instruction. By 1999 the ratio had fallen to 81 cents. And by 2010, it had fallen further, to 73 cents on the dollar.

This has consequences. Economists John Bound, Michael Lovenheim and Sarah Turner have found that falling graduation rates, especially among young men, are concentrated at resource-starved community colleges and less-selective public universities.

These researchers found that increases in the student/faculty ratio were the main culprit in declining graduation rates at public universities. This is driven by lack of resources. At community colleges, weaker student preparation is the problem, and this is a consequence of poverty.

What are candidates saying?

But these are not the issues that worry our candidates most. College debt has grabbed the headlines, so college debt has grabbed their attention.

Donald Trump’s website currently contains nothing about higher education. But his campaign co-chair, Sam Clovis, recently offered the outlines of a Trump position. Among the proposals is that government should get out of the loan business – handing it back to private banks.

What would that mean for high school students, who have no collateral and no credit record? Banks generally will not lend money to 18-year-olds with nebulous plans, absent a guarantee. Clovis suggested the guarantee would come from colleges and universities, who would have to pay for student default. Their “skin” would be in the game.

In fact, Trump’s program would hand private banks a financial windfall, because they would earn the fees and interest, and if a student failed to keep up on payments, someone else would take the hit. In Trump’s world, those would be the schools that currently work with large numbers of “risky” underprivileged students.

Hillary Clinton’s platform contains a $25 billion fund to support private nonprofit colleges that serve underprivileged students. This would be, in our view, a step in the right direction if it could pass through Congress.

What we know about student debt

The substantive proposal in Clinton’s New College Compact is the following:

Every student should have the option to graduate from a public college or university in their state without taking on any student debt.

Our point is there is no good reason why debt should be off the table. Substantial gains go to the students who earn a degree, and reasonable amounts of debt are a good way to finance any long-run investment. Students who borrow near the average levels ($25,000 to $32,000), and who graduate, tend to have little difficulty paying back.

As Sandy Baum of the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, has shown, most of the “extreme” debt is concentrated in two places. The first is graduate students. The returns to their degrees are larger and less uncertain.

A doctor with $160,000 in debt is in much better shape than a dropout who has $14,000 to pay. Most of the dropouts come from under-resourced schools that serve our most at-risk students – this is a problem that worsens inequality.

The second is the for-profit sector. Although for-profits account for only nine percent of degrees awarded, they are responsible for a quarter of the total number of students whose debt exceeds $50,000. For-profits serve a lot of older students and many veterans using GI benefits.

What needs to change

In our view, two reforms could help break the trend toward inequality in the American higher education system.

The first is related to the federal government’s need-based Pell Grants of up to $5,815 per academic year. Pell Grants, which are awarded to low-income, undergraduate students, do not have to be repaid. So, they reduce the price of a year in college.

In today’s dollars, the current maximum Pell Grant has slightly less purchasing power than it did in 1978.

Yet the cost of services – which includes everything from restaurant meals and haircuts to dental care and higher education – has risen faster than the inflation rate. As a result, a Pell Grant covers a declining portion of the cost of a year in college. The maximum Pell Grant covered 94 percent of the tuition and fees at a public university in 2000-01. By 2015-16 it covered only 61 percent. Congress could set the Pell maximum simply by tying increases to an index of service prices.

The second reform that we suggest is a federal program to encourage states to raise their own investment in public universities. Former Democratic Senator Tom Harkin proposed giving states a federal grant based on how much funding they provided per student at their own public universities.

In Harkin’s proposal, states would qualify for a grant if they spent at least $2,865 per student annually. States that offered more funding of their own could get a bigger grant per student from the federal government.

The advantage of Harkin’s bill was that it did not propose to micromanage how the grant would be used. States could use it to hold down tuition growth, but they could also use it to improve the quality of the programming to help underprivileged students. Those are the students who currently fail in large numbers at underfunded public institutions.

We believe these two ideas alone could be a down payment on a fairer higher education system. These ideas would help funnel more resources into the colleges and universities that educate the vast majority of America’s at-risk student population.

David H. Feldman, Professor of Economics, College of William & Mary and Robert B. Archibald, Professor of Economics, College of William & Mary

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Brendan Cantwell, Michigan State University

A recent report by the Boston-based Pioneer Institute pointed out how out-of-state enrollments at the University of Massachusetts are limiting opportunities for in-state students.

For the right-leaning Pioneer Institute, UMass is an example of the public sector run amok. But Pioneer is not alone. There are others who have voiced similar concerns. For example, a state audit came out with a scathing criticism of University of California for discriminating against local students. And recent federal data show 43 of the 50 state flagship schools enrolled fewer local students in 2014 than they did a decade earlier.

My experience as a higher education researcher suggests it is important to understand why colleges and universities are enrolling students from out of state. The point being that years of underfunding and the growth of market-based practices such as competition for tuition revenue have created incentives for colleges and universities to enroll nonresidents. The consequence of this has been added financial strain on lower-income students.

When public universities devote fewer resources to lower-income or minority students, that shows an erosion of the very mission for which the state colleges and universities, were founded.

Wooing nonresident students

Data complied by the College Board show the share of out-of-state students at public colleges and universities grew in 38 states between 2002 and 2012.

And it is not just prominent flagship schools that attracted out-of-state students. A study from the New America Foundation, a public policy think tank, found that even regional colleges are wooing nonresident students.

Clearly, out-of-state students can provide many educational gains: college students benefit when they interact with each other through a process economists call “peer effects,” which include the learning and social development students get from each other. Educational research shows all students gain from a diverse student body. By engaging with peers with different experience and viewpoints, students learn more both in and out of the classroom.

But it may not be the benefits of a diverse student body that are driving public schools to enroll nonresidents.

Going after the money

Nonresident students pay higher tuition at public colleges and universities. In 2013, average in-state tuition at public four-year colleges was US$7,526, but a whopping $17,047 for nonresidents.

Public institutions have been experiencing declining state funding for decades For example, state funds accounted for 52.8 percent of operating expenditures at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1987, but only 16.9 percent by 2012.

It comes as no surprise then that these institutions would look to nonresident students for additional revenue.

A recent study found a strong relationship between state funding and nonresident students enrollment. When states increase funding, public institutions enroll fewer nonresidents.

“Enticing” students

Public colleges and universities were established by the states to educate residents and to improve the lives of people through research and service. However, in recent years, these institutions have become increasingly focused on improving their own bottom line and competing in the marketplace. Recruiting nonresident students who pay high tuition is one way in which public schools compete in markets.

The market for nonresident students can be understood as a form of interstate and international commerce.

Colleges compete to attract wealthy nonresident students by providing “country club” campuses, investing in luxury dorms and other amenities that attract wealthy students.

Who pays the price?

Policymakers in the U.S. have long favored markets in higher education, the idea being that when institutions compete they will offer better-quality and lower-priced education.

The question of quality is difficult to assess, but here is the impact this market-based approach had on price.

Changes to the way higher education was funded in the 1980s and 1990s encouraged colleges to compete for revenue. Aid came to be allocated to students rather than schools and more in the form of loans. Along with this came shrinking of direct funding from the states while increasing funds available through competition.

Over time, competition for revenue helped to drive the price of tuition up. Adjusting for inflation, the average net price for instate tuition at public four-year colleges increased by 170 percent between 1990 to 2015.

Predictably, students and institutions with the fewest resources are left to face the greatest challenges of such a steep hike. In 2008, it took 90 percent of family earnings to cover tuition at a public four-year college for students in the bottom fifth of the income distribution.

In this process, institutions that enroll a high proportion of local lower-income students rather than competing for lucrative nonresidents have become most vulnerable.

For example, underfunding has resulted in overcrowded classrooms and crumbling facilities at the City University of New York, where over half of the students come from families with incomes below US$30,000. And this is not the only such example.

A budget impasse in Illinois brought Chicago State University, with a student population that is 69 percent low-income, to the brink of closure.

What is to be done?

The California-based Campaign for College Opportunity, a nonprofit that works to expand college access, suggests capping nonresident enrollment at public colleges and universities. And the plan is gaining traction. Hillary Clinton recently endorsed caps on nonresidents at the University of California.

Setting limitations on nonresident students might seem to be common sense. However, institutional autonomy has been a strength of higher education in the U.S.

Further, my evaluation of the evidence suggests that it is funding cuts and market competition rather than nonresident enrollments per se that have drawn higher education away from its public mission.

Perhaps little can be done in the near term. But over a longer period public reinvestment combined with renewal of the public mission among state intuitions seems a more sustainable path than an arbitrary cap on nonresident enrollments.

Brendan Cantwell, Assistant Professor of Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education, Michigan State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.