Assistance in the 11th hour

Despite decades of policy interventions to increase college entry among low-income students, substantial disparities in college participation by family income persist. Policy-makers have largely overlooked the summer after high school as an important time period in students' transition to college. During the post-high school summer, students must complete a range of financial and informational tasks prior to college enrollment (e.g. interpreting and acting on financial aid award letters and registering for freshman orientation), yet no longer have access to high school counselors and have not engaged yet with their college community. Moreover, many come from families with little college-going experience to help them with the process. Recent research documents summer attrition rates ranging from 10 – 40 percent among students who had been accepted to college and declared an intention to enroll in college as of high school graduation. Encouragingly, several experimental interventions demonstrate that students' postsecondary enrollment is quite responsive to additional outreach during the summer months. Questions nonetheless remain about how to maximize the impact and cost-effectiveness of summer support. Text messaging and peer mentor outreach programs are two promising approaches to both inform students of college-related summer tasks and to connect them to professional staff when they need help. In my dissertation, I evaluate two large-scale randomized trials I designed and implemented to investigate the role of technology and peer mentor outreach in mitigating summer attrition and helping students enroll and succeed in college. I find that an automated and personalized text messaging campaign to remind students of required college tasks during summer 2012 substantially increased college enrollment in districts where students had limited access to college planning supports over the summer.

I find suggestive evidence that peer mentors positively impacted certain student sub-groups, including students with less defined college plans, but I do not find an overall impact of the intervention, nor do I find positive impacts for a number of other sub-groups. At a cost of $7 per participant, the text message campaign appears to be a cost-effective approach to increase college entry among underrepresented populations in higher education.