Nothing conveys the importance of learning in higher education like a class. Or at least that must be the theory of the people responsible for maintaining the bulletin boards in one of the buildings in which I teach. Every classroom in that building has at least two large bulletin boards, and every inch of space on those boards advertises cheap spring-break vacations to Florida, Texas, the Bahamas, and plenty of other exotic places I regret not visiting when I was stuck in South Bend, Ind., during my undergraduate years.
It may be that my students are less easily distracted than I, but I find my train of thought can get interrupted when I am trying to formulate a complex idea about the quest for national identity in postwar Britain and —during my perambulations about the classroom —I suddenly find myself staring at four beautiful woman in bikinis, beckoning me to join them for drinks on the beach.
I know that the college does not deliberately fill our classrooms with these flyers. Students are paid by tour companies to plaster those advertisements all over the campus. Nevertheless, I find it irritating that my classrooms provide students with such a convenient excuse to turn their attention away from intellectual content and toward idle daydreams about spring break.
Those bulletin boards have been on my mind because I have been reading Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein’s book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. The book was selected by a committee at my college to be our first-year text, which means that all incoming freshman will be given a copy of the book at orientation, and they are expected to have read it when they arrive in August.
The book focuses on the importance of what the authors call “choice architecture” —the design of situations in which individuals have to make choices. To draw from the simple opening example used in the book, a child walks down the food line at her school cafeteria, deciding what to select for her lunchtime meal, and feels the power of the cafeteria’s choice architect —the person who decided which foods to place where in the line, which foods are within the child’s reach, which foods she has to request, and so on. If the vegetables are behind smudged glass and require ladling out by a grumpy service worker, while the candy bars are within reach at the register, the choice architect has helped to ensure that more students will take candy rather than vegetables.
The title of the book derives from the authors’ argument that choice architects in many contexts —health care, finance, education, and more —could make a more deliberate effort to “nudge” people toward choices that will increase their happiness. In determining how and why to do that, the authors favor a doctrine they call “libertarian paternalism.”
By “libertarian,” the authors mean that “people should be free to do what they like —and to opt out of undesirable arrangements if they want to do so.” By “paternalism,” they mean that they hope to “influence choices in a way that will make choosers better off, as judged by themselves.” Unfortunately, the complexity of our world today means that people often don’t fully understand, in arenas like finance or health care, which choice will actually help them achieve their goals. Nudges created by choice architects can help them make decisions they would only be able to make on their own if they had enough time and information.
About halfway into the book, those spring-break bulletin boards popped into my head. They help influence the choices that students make about whether to take full advantage of what my classroom, and their college education, has to offer. Posters that highlighted local art museums, literary readings, or any other intellectual content would be far more likely to stir students into taking the intellectual work of the classroom seriously.
The spring-break posters led me to search for other areas of higher education in which choice architecture —and nudges toward learning —might make a positive difference for our programs or our students. And although Nudge analyzes multiple studies of human decision making, and considers choice architecture from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, I focused my brainstorming on one key strategy in the book: the establishment of defaults.
In a section titled “Defaults: Padding the Path of Least Resistance,” the authors make the case for using default options to help people make better choices. “Many people,” they argue, “will take whatever option requires the least effort, or the path of least resistance.” That is especially true if people are making choices in complex arenas in which they don’t have as much information as an expert might. In other words, “if, for a given choice, there is a default option —an option that will obtain if the chooser does nothing —then we can expect a large number of people to end up with that option, whether or not it is good for them.”
I’ll give just one example of a nudge that the authors recommend in this area. Most of us have the option, when we accept positions in academe, to opt into a retirement plan in which we contribute part of our salary to a managed-investment fund. For many of us, the institution matches our contribution up to a certain amount, essentially offering us a salary bump, albeit a deferred one. While there may exist some situations in which people should not invest in such a plan, the matching contributions make enrollment in the plan a sound financial decision. In spite of that, many people don’t take the steps necessary to enroll.
The authors cite an example from Britain in which employees had the option of enrolling in a plan that was entirely financed by their employer, and yet only around half of the employees took the necessary steps to enroll. The obvious nudge here would be to select a reasonable contribution rate for employees to make into their retirement plans, and then to automatically enroll all new employees at that rate. They would be free to opt out if they chose, and they would be given information on how to do so, but otherwise they would be enrolled.
In the spirit of Nudge, here are three simple defaults that both institutions and faculty members could use in higher education:
Defaulting into honors. The first nudge was suggested to me by Tom White, the economist I profiled in March’s column. As of June 1, I took over as director of the honors program at my college. The program has just three years under its belt, and the number of students enrolling annually has varied from full to light. To offer a full range of honors courses, however, we need to enroll a full class each year. The default nudge here would be for us to shift away from sending out letters inviting the top students in the incoming class to apply, as we have done in the past, and, instead, adopt a model in which we automatically enroll top students into the honors program and then send them a letter explaining the details and how to opt out.
A nudge like that could work for a variety of programs on campuses, so long as —keeping in mind the ideal of libertarian paternalism —students are free to quit. Still, participating in the honors program is probably not in the best of interest of all of our top students since some of them might have double or triple majors, so I have to think more about whether I would really take my own advice here.
Virtual learning environments. One of the major complaints I hear about Blackboard and other such virtual environments has been that, unless students are forced to log on and participate, they frequently don’t bother. Many instructors take time to post resources and information on those sites, only to discover that students never bother using most of it unless they are required to do so.
Last year in one of my courses, I experimented with giving students the option of turning in their papers either in hard copy or through the digital dropbox on my course Web site. Some of the students who took advantage of the online convenience told me afterward that it was the first time they had made use of the site.
For this coming year, I am going to require at least one or two assignments, in each course, to be turned in electronically via the course’s Web site. Doing so will force everyone to log on at least a couple of times a semester, at which point I can make sure I post a few resources that hopefully will entice them to come back for more.
Classroom seating. I have always believed that small class discussions fare better when students are able to interact not only with me but with one another. And that happens more easily if students are arranged in a circle or a U-shape so that they can see and speak to one another, rather than just speak up to me at the front of the classroom. And yet, I almost always yield to the default arrangement of the desks in my classrooms. I seem to have a hard time exerting that extra little bit of energy I would need to get students up and moving desks around before we start. I stroll right down the path of least resistance.
For a campus or a department that has had that same experience, the default nudge here would be to ask the buildings-and-grounds department —or even the architects in the planning stages of new spaces —to have the circle or the U-shape as the normal arrangement of desks in every small classroom. The desks should be movable, for those instructors who like students in rows, but the easy option is the one that promotes students seeing and speaking directly to one another, and not simply to the instructor.
All three of those nudges would be simple to implement and could have a substantial impact on students’ educational experience. Of course that is the real premise of Nudge —that simple changes in choice architecture can have major influences on people’s lives.
If you have made nudges to an institution, program, or course, even if you did not think about it in the terms outlined in the book, please send them my way (careers@chronicle.com), and I’ll pass along the best ones I receive in a future column.
