@EdWorkingPaper{ai23-867,
title = "Do Financial Incentives Support Educational Programs to Scale? Experimental Evidence from a National College Advising Initiative",
author = "Kelli A. Bird, Benjamin L. Castleman",
institution = "Annenberg Institute at Brown University",
number = "867",
year = "2023",
month = "October",
URL = "http://www.edworkingpapers.com/ai23-867",
abstract = {Recent work highlights the challenge of scaling evidence-based strategies to achieve social policy objectives. In the context of education, programs that have had large effects on student attainment at the local level have had much smaller or insignificant effects when scaled more broadly. We evaluate, through a randomized control trial, a national financial incentive program designed to increase student engagement with college advising and completion of college and financial aid milestones that prior experimental studies demonstrate contribute to increased college enrollment and success. We find substantial positive effects of the incentive program on each of the incented behaviors: Treated students were more likely to engage regularly with a college advisor; apply to well-matched colleges and universities; and meet with an advisor to review their financial aid awards and discuss college costs. Impacts were largest for students with low baseline propensity to apply to selective colleges and universities and for students with low exposure to these institutions where they lived, suggesting the incentives were effective at overcoming informational and social capital barriers faced by these students. Yet students randomly offered the incentives were no more likely to enroll at higher-quality colleges and universities, despite being high in the distribution of college entrance exam scores and from a socioeconomic background that many institutions indicate is central to their diversity goals. Student responses to a survey administered the summer and fall after high school suggest that lack of admission to the most selective institutions, lack of affordability at selective institutions to which students were admitted, and student preferences to attend institutions closer to home explain the lack of enrollment effects. Interventions which increase completion of key college and financial milestones--even when effectively scaled--may thus be insufficient to increase socioeconomic representation at selective institutions without parallel investments to increase admissions and affordability.},
}