Also available as NBER Working Paper No. 25349 [NBER version]
High-achieving, low-income students attend selective colleges at far lower rates than upper-income students with similar achievement. Behavioral biases, intensified by complexity and uncertainty in the admissions and aid process, may explain this gap. In a large-scale experiment we test an early commitment of free tuition at a flagship university. The intervention did not increase aid: rather, students were guaranteed before application the same grant aid that they would qualify for in expectation after admission. The offer substantially increased application (68 percent vs 26 percent) and enrollment rates (27 percent vs 12 percent). The results suggest that uncertainty, present bias, and loss aversion loom large in students’ college decisions.
Proposed "free college'" policies vary widely in design. The simplest set tuition to zero for everyone. More targeted approaches limit free tuition to those who demonstrate need through an application process. We experimentally test the effects of these two models on the schooling decisions of low-income students. An unconditional free tuition offer from a large public university substantially increases application and enrollment rates. A free tuition offer contingent on proof of need has a much smaller effect on application and none on enrollment. These results are consistent with students placing a high value on financial certainty when making schooling decisions.
Beliefs about relative academic performance may shape college major choice and explain gender gaps in STEM, but little causal evidence exists. To test whether these beliefs are malleable and salient enough to change behavior, I run a randomized experiment with 5,700 undergraduates across seven introductory STEM courses. Providing relative performance information shrinks gender gaps in biased beliefs substantially. However, students' course-taking and major choice are largely unchanged. If anything, initially overconfident men and women were discouraged by the intervention. Targeting college students' beliefs may not be a useful target for increasing female STEM participation.
The Advanced Placement (AP) program is widely offered in American high schools and has been touted as a way to close racial and socioeconomic gaps in educational outcomes. Using administrative data from Michigan, I exploit variation within high schools across time in AP course offerings to identify the relationship between AP course availability, AP participation, and postsecondary outcomes. I find that students from non economically disadvantaged families, white and Asian students, and higher-achieving students are more likely to take advantage of additional AP courses when they are offered, thus widening existing gaps in course-taking. I find little evidence that additional AP availability is related to improved college outcomes for any students, with the exception of the most academically prepared students. Expanding access to AP courses without additional incentives or support for disadvantaged students to succeed is unlikely to address educational inequality.
Implicit stereotypes about gender and STEM may unconsciously shape students' academic choices and contribute to gender gaps in major choice, but there is limited economic evidence on this channel. To study this relationship, we administer a gender-science Implicit Association Test (IAT) to a sample of primarily first-semester undergraduates, and link results to original survey data and administrative transcript data. On average, students in our sample implicitly associate men with STEM and women with humanities, with no differences by student gender. Our key finding is that implicit stereotypes are strongly predictive of behavior. Male students with a one standard deviation higher male-science association are 7-9 ppt more likely to intend to major in STEM, while female students are 8-10 ppt less likely. We find similar relationships between implicit stereotypes and observed STEM course-taking and officially declared major. These patterns are robust to controls for expected earnings, preferences for major characteristics such as salary and job flexibility, presence of female role models, and explicit beliefs about women in STEM and humanities. Our results suggest that implicit stereotypes may be a promising focus for interventions targeting gender gaps.
Grades students receive are likely a key input into major choice, and prior observational work suggests the relationship varies by gender. I study a natural experiment within the economics department of a large university, which changed its grading policy to give out higher grades in its introductory economics courses. I leverage this variation to compare students with the same underlying performance but who received different letter grades. I find that receiving a higher grade (e.g., an A- over a B+ or a C over a C-) in introductory economics increases the likelihood that a student will take the next course in the sequence by 2.6 percentage points, with smaller effects (1 ppt) on economics major choice. Higher economics grades lead more students (2.4 ppts) to declare a major in business--the highest-earning major at the studied institution. I find little evidence that women are more responsive to grades than men. My findings suggest that grade inflation as a policy may work to retain more students within a field, but is unlikely to close gender gaps. Given the complexity of college major choice and interdependence across subjects and courses, the optimal policy may not be straightforward.