Can ‘Microscholarships’ Steer Student Behavior?

Going to professors’ office hours. Meeting with an adviser. Getting involved on campus. Colleges have a pretty good idea of the student behaviors that are associated with retention. How can they encourage students to do those things?

A company called RaiseMe is pitching a new approach: Colleges can use its platform to offer students “microscholarships,” or relatively small credits toward their bill, in return for completing such tasks. On Friday, RaiseMe announced that it’s conducting a pilot project on student-success microscholarships with Wayne State University, a public institution in Detroit. The company plans to expand the pilot to a handful of other colleges soon.

This year, participating freshmen at Wayne State can earn $10 to $50 a pop for activities like attending a campus arts or athletics event or taking a study-skills workshop. The total they earn — capped at $500 — will be subtracted from their college bill next fall. The thinking is that both the additional financial support and the things students do to earn it will increase the chances that they will stay enrolled.

RaiseMe conducted a smaller pilot at Wayne State over the summer to see if a similar approach could reduce the number of students who “melted,” or did not enroll as planned. The results of that pilot are not yet available.

Improving student success is an imperative for higher ed, and colleges are trying all kinds of strategies to move the needle. Traditionally, colleges have developed specialized programs or offered courses to help students navigate campus pitfalls. Microscholarships focus on the behavior of students and represent a sort of twist on the more-common idea of “nudging” them toward a particular action, by, say, sending them personalized reminders.

The hope is that giving students money to take those steps will prove to be more effective. Still, the model raises questions about whether colleges’ efforts to help students risk undermining their motivation — and about what kind of support students ultimately need.

The new student-success efforts are an expansion of RaiseMe’s existing model: About 300 colleges already work with the company to offer microscholarships to prospective students. High-school students — and community-college students intending to transfer — can accrue microscholarships at specific colleges they’re interested in by taking actions and meeting goals those colleges lay out. One college might give a student $100 for earning an A in a high-school course and $500 for having perfect attendance. Another might offer $1,000 for volunteering.

If students are accepted by and enroll at a college where they’ve earned microscholarships, then the college will reduce their bill accordingly — perhaps by thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. The students still receive the need-based aid they qualify for and may get additional merit aid, depending on the college’s policies.

RaiseMe is free for students; colleges pay the company a fee to participate.

Transparency, and a Road Map

Some observers might not love the idea of a college’s paying prospective students to earn certain grades or participate in particular activities. But doing so is a common practice: It’s called merit aid. RaiseMe says its model has the advantage of giving students — especially disadvantaged ones — some transparency about what colleges are really looking for, and a roadmap to achieve it.

There are advantages for the colleges, too. Applicants who participate in RaiseMe are admitted and enroll at higher rates than those who don’t — welcome news for admissions offices trying to build a class. The program can be a step toward leveling the playing field for disadvantaged students. It’s also a way for colleges to reach prospective students who may not otherwise be familiar with them — and to do so as early as the ninth grade.

Sure, colleges reward incoming students for their high-school achievements all the time. But they don’t generally give students money for joining a club or going to office hours. So while RaiseMe’s expansion might make perfect sense to an enrollment manager whose portfolio includes retention as well as admissions, it could raise eyebrows on other parts of a campus.

That’s in part because many faculty members are skeptical anytime companies profit from influencing academic matters. Jesse Stommel, a senior lecturer in digital studies at the University of Mary Washington, in Virginia, is one of them. Stommel likes that RaiseMe gives students “very visible and clear goalposts” for what they should do, he said.

But he worries that solutions like microscholarships can obscure the bigger student-success problems for colleges: The financial-aid system is broken, Stommel said, and students need a lot more high-touch, human support. “It feels a little like ‘There’s an app for that,’” he said. “There’s an app for retaining students — and it’s more complicated than that.”

Wayne State, for one, is under no illusion that there’s a silver bullet for student success. For years the university has labored to improve its six-year graduation rate, which stood at just 28 percent in 2012. The university’s leaders want to see a six-year graduation rate of 50 percent by 2020, said Dawn Medley, associate vice president for enrollment management, and it’s getting close.

To achieve that level of progress, Wayne State has tried just about everything: overhauling its advising system and how it awards scholarships, using predictive analytics and a chatbot system, offering emergency grants and providing a food pantry. “If there is a practice out there,” Medley said, “then we want to make sure we’re doing that practice, and doing it well.”

The university has had a good experience with RaiseMe on the admissions side, Medley said. Of the 2,968 admissions deposits the university received for the fall, 879 came from students who had used the platform. Of those, 515 came from students who had learned of the university from RaiseMe.

More than anything, Medley said, RaiseMe helps Wayne State signal its interest in students who may have thought that a four-year college was out of reach — while there’s still time for those students to take steps to prepare.

For current students, Medley said, the program could help “socially norm” the sorts of behaviors that the university knows are linked to student success.

Ideally, Medley said, she’d like to see microscholarships cover the university’s annual tuition increases for students. If more students are retained, the university can make up the difference in volume. Still, she said, the effort is not a replacement for anything else the university is trying. “We’ve got 15 irons in the fire,” Medley said. “This is the 16th.”

Inhibiting Motivation?

Benjamin Castleman, an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Virginia, who has had some discussions with RaiseMe about the design of its program for first-year students, is intrigued by the idea. Castleman’s research focuses on using nudges, or low-cost, low-touch interventions, to encourage students to follow through on their intentions.

He considers RaiseMe’s approach a nudge coupled with a financial incentive, and he thinks that may be a promising direction — especially in the wake of recent evidence that more-traditional nudges have not been successful when tested at scale. Perhaps, Castleman said, attaching money to a nudge will give it more force.

But there are two main objections to the model, Castleman said. The first concerns the idea of paying students to do what they should do anyhow. That doesn’t particularly bother him. One way or another, he said, colleges and taxpayers support lots of efforts to help students, and affluent students get a great deal more support than microscholarships provide.

The other critique, Castleman said, is that rewarding students for certain behaviors could inhibit their intrinsic motivation. He agrees that paying students to do something habitual, like study, would be problematic. “There’s a more-compelling argument,” he said, “to try this out on discrete, one-time things.”

Even then, Castleman said, a program like this should be developed with care, rolled out slowly, and researched rigorously. “There’s always the potential for unintended consequences,” he said. Colleges know that the behaviors they’re encouraging are associated with student success.

But students get only 24 hours in a day, and how they spend their time always comes with trade-offs. A student who’s successfully encouraged to attend a tutoring session, he said, might not benefit if she’d otherwise have spent that time quietly studying in the library.

Beckie Supiano writes about teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.