Why ‘Nudges’ to Help Students Succeed Are Catching On

An admitted student pays a deposit to hold a spot in a college’s incoming class, but then never shows up on the campus. Enrollment managers encounter that phenomenon often enough to have given it a name — “summer melt” — and have created all manner of strategies to predict and prevent it.

From the college’s point of view, melt is just one more moving part of making a class. As for the students who never show up, colleges often assume that they’ve simply enrolled somewhere else.

A few years ago new research challenged that assumption. It found that around 20 to 30 percent of low-income students in urban districts who were admitted by and were ready to attend a four-year college did not enroll anywhere.

The researchers, Ben Castleman and Lindsay C. Page, took their work a step further. They tested a simple, cheap solution: Send at-risk students a series of customized text-message reminders that they could reply to for extra help. The messages raised enrollment substantially at the test sites where students were underserved.

That’s one example of how behavioral economics — which considers the cognitive, emotional, and social factors that keep people from following through on their intentions — has been applied to college access and success. Testing behavioral interventions is a small but growing part of higher-education research — and one that’s getting lots of attention.

There’s enough behavioral work being done in education that Mr. Castleman, an assistant professor of education and public policy at the University of Virginia, wrote a book, The 160-Character Solution, summarizing it and suggesting how it might be applied. Ms. Page, an assistant professor of education at the University of Pittsburgh, co-wrote a recent paper summarizing college-access research that includes a section on behavioral approaches. And ideas42, a nonprofit organization working on behavioral interventions, has more than a dozen higher-education projects in the works.

All of that makes this a good moment to take stock of behavioral higher-education research. What behavioral solutions are being tested on students? What makes them so appealing? And what role can they play in dealing with some of higher ed’s persistent problems?

Any synopsis of the rise of behavioral economics must begin with Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, the 2008 book by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein that popularized it. A nudge, they explained, encourages — but does not mandate — a certain behavior: think putting healthier options at eye level in the cafeteria. Many scholars tackling behavioral problems in higher education see their work as one branch of an approach that’s being used in a bunch of policy areas, notably health care and finance.

A nudge, like the text-message reminders that helped students make the transition to college, offers a workaround to help people get through a complex system, says Katie Martin, a former managing director of ideas42 who now works for a member of Parliament in Britain. But there’s more to the behavioral approach than that, she says. It can also be used to redesign systems so that they’re easier to navigate in the first place.

Robert M. Shireman, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who once served as deputy under secretary of education in the Obama administration, agrees. When people struggle to fill out a form, helping them through it is great. But, he says, “you want to ask the question, Do we need this form?” And if, in fact, the form is needed, perhaps it can be simplified.

Mr. Shireman’s complex form is not a theoretical example: He means the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. For years researchers and student advocates have known that the Fafsa presents a barrier to college access and affordability. And the Education Department made significant progress in reducing its complexity during his tenure there, says Mr. Shireman, by thinking about people’s behaviors.

Those steps included one that some observers had believed to be impossible — getting the Internal Revenue Service to let filers import data from their tax returns into the Fafsa. But others were simpler tweaks, like changing the wording on the online welcome screen to encourage families to begin their applications even if they didn’t have all of their information in front of them, rather than insisting that they wait until they had gathered all of that paperwork.

Behavioral Strategies Come to College

Researchers usually describe behavioral strategies in contrast to more-traditional fixes, like giving students more counseling or financial aid. But the lines between those approaches are not totally clear. Experts don’t even agree on whether a well-known study that has influenced current behavioral research counts as a behavioral study itself.

The experiment it described involved the tax-preparation company H&R Block and tested two approaches to encourage families to file the Fafsa. Some scholars see it as a classic example of behavioral work in higher ed. Others aren’t sure it really qualifies, since one of the approaches — the one that worked best — had tax professionals help families with the form.

Even Eric P. Bettinger, one of the study’s authors, says it’s open to interpretation. He says there are two aspects of behavioral work: trying to solve a behavioral problem, and doing so with a behavioral solution. At its core, he says, the H&R Block study was meant to solve a behavioral problem. Many people who would qualify for student aid don’t file the Fafsa, because they procrastinate, presumably, or because the form is complex. But whether the solution is behavioral is up for debate.

Mr. Castleman points out another place where the lines get blurry: how behavioral work like his fits into social psychology. Would social psychologists — who have been tackling such questions for decades — put their higher-education work under the same umbrella?

Not exactly, says Gregory M. Walton, an associate professor of psychology at Stanford University. Social psychologists are interested in how people make sense of an experience, which can in turn direct their behavior.

“We begin a step back in the causal process,” Mr. Walton says. As a result, social psychology’s interventions often strive to change how students see the social world around them, or actually change that world — for instance, by having teachers frame their feedback differently.

Beyond ‘Nudge’

However it’s defined, behavioral economics is having a moment in higher-education research. With all due credit to Mr. Thaler and Mr. Sunstein, their book is just part of the reason. Behavioral economics has some built-in appeal: The approach is elegant, creative, and aligned with common sense. It’s possible some people would argue that we act like completely rational beings, but probably not anyone who spends a lot of time around college students.

Higher-education scholarship has moved in a more-experimental direction in the last 15 years or so, says Andrew P. Kelly, director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Center on Higher Education Reform. Randomized controlled trials are in, and behavioral solutions lend themselves to that kind of experiment.

Behavioral approaches also fit another current movement, the push for “evidence-based policy,” says Alissa Fishbane, a managing director with ideas42.

Given their low cost, behavioral solutions often appealing to funders and policy makers. When a solution is as cheap as sending text messages or information packets, “it doesn’t have to transform the world,” says Sandy Baum, an economist who co-edited (with Mr. Castleman and Saul Schwartz) a volume on behavioral approaches to college access and success. It simply has to make “a measurable difference.”

But the flip side of the coin is that such low-cost solutions cannot replace other, pricier efforts to improve college access and success. Pointing students toward “better” colleges isn’t much help unless there are good colleges for them to go to. Easing the process of applying for financial aid matters only if there are grants and loans available.

Higher-education watchers can glean all sorts of insights from behavioral experiments, Mr. Kelly says. Sometimes, simply reading about the problems that experiments are trying to solve provides an important reality check on what students are up against. Researching colleges, applying, filing the Fafsa, registering for classes — the whole process of getting to and through college can be seen as a series of complex decisions crying out for a nudge. Higher education presents a “perfect storm for the frailties of human reasoning,” Mr. Kelly says. “The system often seems set up to frustrate people.”

That’s especially true for the least-advantaged students, as Judith Scott-Clayton showed in “The Shapeless River,” a paper describing the unstructured environment that community-college students must navigate.

Nudging students along might not be enough, but at least it’s something. To Mr. Castleman, part of the appeal of behavioral interventions is that they can be applied right now, while wholesale change takes much longer.

Still, there’s reason to be careful, Mr. Kelly says. An intervention that helps students on average may leave some individuals worse off than they were without it. A student who is nudged into college only to drop out in debt hasn’t really benefited. And it’s not clear whether behavioral interventions make the large-scale reforms that advocates want to see more or less likely.

Critics of efforts to simplify or inform students’ choices often say that college isn’t meant to be easy. If someone cannot successfully apply for financial aid, maybe that person doesn’t belong in college. Researchers typically respond by saying they are working to help students through the pesky tasks on the periphery of going to college. Filing the Fafsa — which, incidentally, the most advantaged students don’t have to deal with — isn’t meant to be an admissions test.

But those efforts might not stay on the periphery forever. One can imagine a future in which students are nudged through the academic work that is supposed to challenge them. When does an intervention become a crutch? That’s one of many questions researchers will have to grapple with in the future.

Beckie Supiano writes about college affordability, the job market for new graduates, and professional schools, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.