Digital Messaging to Improve College Enrollment and Success

 This study investigates the efficacy of text messaging campaigns to remind students about and support them with key steps in the college search, application, selection and transition process. 

First, in collaboration with the College Board and uAspire, both national non-profit organizations, the authors implemented text-message based outreach and advising to students in over 700 US high schools that primarily serve large shares of low-income students. 

Second, the authors  collaborated with several school districts in the state of Texas to implement a school-based version of the intervention. 

In the national sample, treatment students received outreach approximately once per month from uAspire counselors, whereas in the Texas sample, treatment students received outreach once every one to two weeks from their high school counselors. In both samples, outreach began in Spring 2015 and continued through September 2016. 

The authors tested these interventions with concurrent cluster randomized control trials with randomization at the school level. In contrast to the national version of the intervention, which tended to produce null effects, the school-based intervention yielded positive and significant impacts on several college-going steps and on college enrollment for certain subgroups. 

State Investment in Higher Education: Effects on Human Capital Formation, Student Debt, and Long-term Financial Outcomes

Most public colleges and universities rely heavily on state financial support. As state budgets have tightened in recent decades, appropriations for higher education have declined substantially. Despite concerns expressed by policymakers and scholars that the declines in state support have reduced the return to education investment for public sector students, little evidence exists that can identify the causal effect of these funds on long-run outcomes. 

This study presents the first such analysis in the literature using new data that leverages the merger of two rich datasets: consumer credit records from the New York Fed's Consumer Credit Panel (CCP) sourced from Equifax and administrative college enrollment and attainment data from the National Student Clearinghouse. 

The authors overcome identification concerns related to the endogeneity of state appropriation variation using an instrument that interacts the baseline share of total revenue that comes from state appropriations at each public institution with yearly variation in state-level appropriations. Their analysis is conducted separately for two-year and four-year students, and we analyze individuals into their mid-30s. 

For four-year students, the authors find that state appropriation increases lead to substantially lower student debt originations. They also react to appropriation increases by shortening their time to degree, but we find little effect on other outcomes. 

In the two-year sector, state appropriation increases lead to more collegiate and post-collegiate educational attainment, more educational debt consistent with the increased educational attainment, but lower likelihood of delinquency and default. State support also leads to more car and home ownership with lower adverse debt outcomes, and these students experience substantial increases in their credit score and in the affluence of the neighborhood in which they live. 

Examining mechanisms, the authors find state appropriations are passed on to students in the form of lower tuition in the four-year sector with no institutional spending response. 

For community colleges, the authors find evidence of both price and quality mechanisms, the latter captured in higher educational resources in key spending categories. These results are consistent with the different pattern of effects we document in the four-year and two-year sectors., and underscore the importance of state support for higher education in driving student debt outcomes and the long-run returns to postsecondary investments students experience.

Community College Baccalaureate Graduates - Demographics and Labor Market Outcomes

 

Full report

In this report explores the demographic characteristics and labor market outcomes of baccalaureate graduates from the Florida College System and compare them to associate degree graduates in similar fields. Better understanding of who CCB graduates are—including how they may differ from other students—and whether they reap better economic rewards than associate degree graduates will shed light on the value these programs bring to equity, access, and attainment conversations. 

Using state data on three cohorts of graduates, the report analyzes disaggregated data by race, age group, and gender. The three main sections of this analysis focus on the demographics of graduates in the sample and how they compare to the population of Florida, rates at which graduates are employed or pursue further education, and graduates’ wages. This research provides additional data on the outcomes of community college baccalaureate degrees for graduates, which can in turn inform state policy to support and target these types of degree programs.

A social-belonging intervention improves STEM outcomes for ESL students

 

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A social-belonging intervention improves STEM outcomes for students who speak English as a second language.

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Provided by Indiana University

A study conducted at 19 universities by IU researchers and their colleagues in the U.S. and Canada, found that a brief social belonging exercise, administered online before students arrive on campus, boosts the performance and persistence of students in STEM disciplines - science, technology, engineering and math - who speak English as a second language.

Published this week in the journal Science Advances, the study demonstrates that the exercise increases ESL students' perception that a sense of belonging on campus will grow over time. It also increases the number of STEM credits ESL students successfully completed, as well as their STEM GPAs.

 

As Jennifer LaCosse, an IU post-doctoral researcher and lead author on the study, explained, ESL students are greatly underrepresented in U.S. colleges, particularly within STEM fields, and their absence is a disadvantage both to the students themselves and the economy more broadly. Having a college degree, particularly in STEM fields, gives ESL students the opportunity to have higher paying jobs and more successful careers overall. It also creates a diverse and multilingual workforce that is needed to meet the needs of an increasingly globalized economy.

Results of the study suggest that one way to increase the representation and academic success of ESL students in STEM is to target their sense of belonging. "Students often ask themselves, 'Do I belong here?' and we know that this concern can undermine academic performance and persistence," said LaCosse.

Students who speak English as a second language often report concerns about not fitting in with native English-speaking students and a lack of social connections. In addition, many are required to pass language proficiency tests or enroll in special ESL courses during their first few years of college.

"These policies can metaphorically and literally separate ESL students from non-ESL students during the pivotal transition to college when feelings of belonging are critical," said LaCosse. "Finding ways of buttressing ESL students' feelings of belonging may be essential to their academic success--which is what we wanted to examine in our research."

The study utilized data collected at 19 universities from more than 12,000 STEM students by the College Transition Collaborative, a partnership co-founded by IU social psychologist and study co-author Mary Murphy. Students in the study who were randomly assigned to receive the social belonging treatment, read short stories attributed to juniors and seniors describing the challenges they faced in their transition to college. The students in the stories initially questioned the degree to which they belonged in college; and yet, with time they ultimately developed a greater sense of belonging. Study participants followed the readings with a writing exercise about their own experiences.

Results of the study revealed that both ESL and non-ESL students who received the social belonging exercise anticipated greater growth in their sense of belonging than students who received the control treatment. However, these psychological gains in belonging only bolstered the academic persistence and performance of ESL students. Specifically, STEM-interested ESL students who received the social-belonging exercise (vs. the control group, which did not) completed more of the STEM courses that they began in their first term in college--and this effect persisted through the first year. ESL students who completed the social belonging exercise also earned higher STEM GPAs in Term 1 than did their ESL peers who did not.

"People do not often think about ESL students as a disadvantaged group in the same way they do about other disadvantaged students, such as Black or women students," observed LaCosse. "The results of this study, however, provide rigorous empirical evidence that ESL students have similar psychological experiences to these other disadvantaged students."

As co-author Mary Murphy, IU professor of psychological and brain sciences noted, "Because of the large sample size across so many universities this is one of the first studies to quantitatively examine and mitigate this important psychological barrier for ESL students in STEM fields as they begin college."

"The findings are really exciting," said LaCosse, "because ESL students' psychological experiences in higher education have received far less attention than they deserve. Our research suggests that we need to rethink the policies and practices that are in place that create and maintain the underrepresentation of ESL students in higher education."

Receiving disciplinary equity reports doesn't improve disciplinary equity

 One commonly used strategy used in attempts to decrease racial disproportionality in school discipline across the country is sharing data with school administrators that discipline disparities are a problem in their schools with the assumption that it will increase attention to equity and improve outcomes. 

The purpose of this study was to assess the effects of providing monthly disciplinary equity reports to school administrators in 35 schools on levels of (a) disciplinary equity report viewing, (b) disciplinary equity, and (c) inclusion of disciplinary equity into school improvement plan goals useing a small, double-blind randomized controlled trial in which half of the schools were randomly assigned to receive either monthly disciplinary equity reports or monthly general discipline reports. 

Results showed that schools receiving the equity reports had significantly increased rates of viewing equity reports but no meaningful change in disciplinary equity or equity goal setting.

Prior Problem Behaviors Do Not Account for the Racial Suspension Gap

 At the end of 2018, Obama-era disciplinary guidance aimed at reducing the use of suspensions in schools (especially for minorities and students with disabilities) was revoked by the U.S. Department of Education. A key piece of research supporting the decision was based on the analyses of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998–1999 (ECLS-K), which showed that the racial suspension gap was not really about race but resulted from the differential behavior exhibited by Black and White students. 

This study reanalyzed the public-use ECLS-K and provide syntax for our analyses to show that the findings were primarily due to sample selection bias. Several alternative model specifications were tested and continued to show the persistence of the race-based suspension gaps regardless of model or measure used.

Employment of College Graduates since the Great Recession

 

Job-finding rates and wages fell for new graduates entering the labor market in 2009 and 2010, but poorer prospects for young workers actually began before the recession and continued through the recovery. There has been a substantial deterioration in the employment prospects of recent college graduates, Jesse Rothstein finds in The Lost Generation? Labor Market Outcomes for Post Great Recession Entrants (NBER Working Paper 27516). Cohorts that graduated during the period of economic weakness following the recession, which ended in 2009, had trouble finding toeholds on job ladders and generally have had weak earnings trajectories. However, this phenomenon is not simply a result of the recession. Graduates who entered the labor market beginning around 2005, as well as those who entered in the economically stronger period 2011–19, have had lower employment rates, relative to older workers in the same labor market, than earlier entrants. Something appears to have changed in the labor market, creating negative effects on new generations' employment rates. Rothstein studies the early-career economic outcomes of college graduates in the period between the Great Recession and the coronavirus-related economic collapse. He uses repeated cross-section data from the monthly Current Population Survey to examine individuals born between 1948 and 1997. He observes them at ages 22 to 40, between 1979 and 2019. His primary indicator is weekly employment. The cohort that entered the labor market in 2010 experienced an employment rate that was on average 2 percentage points lower than what would have been expected based on earlier periods. The decline is even larger for more recent cohorts. Also, in the cohort that entered the labor market in 2009, wages for those who are employed are lower than those in cohorts that entered earlier, by about 2 percent. Both employment and wages exhibit "scarring" effects of early-career conditions, though in different ways. Those who face high unemployment rates at the start of their careers have lower wages through their first several years in the labor market, but these scars gradually fade. Scarring effects on employment, in contrast, are permanent. Cohorts that face high unemployment when they enter the labor market have lower employment rates throughout their careers. Rothstein finds a structural break in young college graduates' employment rate beginning with the cohorts that entered the labor market around 2005. The decline in employment rates continued after the recession of 2008–9, not just for those who entered during the downturn, but for successive cohorts as well. Scarring effects, while quantitatively important, are not large enough to account for these outcomes. Moreover, they cannot explain poor outcomes for the most recent pre-pandemic entrants, who encountered historically low unemployment rates at the outset of their careers. The labor market grew steadily stronger from 2011–19, and overall employment rates rose, but the employment rates of new graduates were stagnant despite this rising tide. The most recent cohorts have relative employment rates 3 to 4 percentage points lower than would have been anticipated based on the pre-2005 trend.