On December 11th at the Brookings Institution, Brookings Senior Fellow Sarah Reber presented her new report "Supporting students to and through college: What does the evidence say?". This event, hosted by the Center for Economic Security and Opportunity (CESO), was a significant gathering. Reber's short presentation summarized the report's findings, followed by a panel featuring higher education experts moderated by Brookings Fellow Katharine Meyer. Panelists included Reber herself; Ben Castleman, an associate professor in the economics of education at the University of Virginia and founder of Nudge4 Solutions Lab; Michelle Dimino, the director of education at the D.C. think tank Third Way; and Shun Robertson, the senior vice president at the University of North Carolina (UNC) system.
Key Insights from the Report
As the event opened, Reber's presentation emphasized that with evidence supporting high returns to higher education, addressing college access and completion is crucial. In the report, Reber noted that disparities in high school preparedness lead to uneven college access and completion rates, which are worsened by a student's socioeconomic status. Consequently, these students may face challenges in the classroom due to home financial and personal issues. Reber's report serves as a detailed summary and analysis of interventions aimed at increasing college enrollment and graduation rates to reduce such disparities.Intervention Categories and Findings
Reber divides these interventions into three categories - advisors and navigators, comprehensive programs, and low-touch. She finds that comprehensive programs show the most promising results. Based on her review, she highlighted three lessons in her presentation. Firstly, institutions should focus on what they can do well and sustain. Although comprehensive programs are effective, they are expensive and hard to maintain. Secondly, inducing students into more selective institutions is a good strategy for increasing completion rates, but only if high-quality and affordable options are available. Thirdly, the effectiveness of FAFSA information and support interventions is limited by the complexity of the process itself. Students need to know about their financial aid options before applying to colleges.Areas for Further Research
Reber also discussed areas where more research is needed. This includes how to best encourage students to use support services, barriers to simplification, the role of faculty, how programs affect students' long-term outcomes, and measuring the value of credits that don't lead to a credential. She concluded that while structural problems will limit progress, evidence suggests that incremental improvements are possible and there is a wealth of existing research to draw from in future work.During the panel, Robertson found that Reber's point on simplification was particularly relevant to some of the UNC system's programs to make the application and financial aid process smoother for North Carolina high schoolers. Throughout the panel, Robertson emphasized transfer students as a target group for enrollment interventions and highlighted the importance of early notification for successful transfers from community college to a four-year program.Dimino emphasized Reber's discussion of program sustainability and expanded the scope to include financial resources, administrative and staffing capabilities, and state legislative support.Castleman, who has conducted extensive research on using nudges to shape students' actions and improve completion rates, pointed out that successful information programs are those that send information from someone with a personal relationship with the student, like an involved advisor. He argued that the most promising interventions are those that establish or encourage sustained human relationships between students and their advisors or mentors.Themes in the rest of the panel included the implementation and replication of interventions at institutions, the role of the federal government, the tradeoffs between efficacy and scale of programs, setting quality standards for underperforming colleges, and student displacement from selective institutions.To learn more about the report and the future of higher education research, watch the recording of the event here.
