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Applying behavioral insights to improve postsecondary outcomes: A review of Obama
administration efforts and next steps under the Trump administration
Katharine Meyer1 and Kelly Ochs Rosinger2
1University of Virginia
405 Emmet Street
Charlottesville, VA 22904
[email protected] (corresponding author)
2Pennsylvania State University
400 Rackley Building
University Park, PA 16802
Abstract Amidst growing public concern in the United States over college access and affordability, federal
policymakers have implemented many low-cost, behaviorally-informed strategies aimed at simplifying
the college-going process and reducing informational barriers. Our paper reviews recent US federal
policies and interventions that draw on insights from the behavioral sciences to help students navigate
various stages of the college-going process and summarizes empirical evidence of these efforts on college
outcomes, highlighting variations across interventions and for various student populations. We conclude
with up-to-date discussions of policy proposals and opportunities for behavioral science applications in
postsecondary education. This review is timely given the upcoming reauthorization of the Higher
Education Act and the 2018 Congressional midterm elections in the United States, both of which are
likely to feature discussions around college access and affordability.
Keywords: behavioral sciences; college access and affordability; higher education policy
JEL Classifications: I22 (Educational Finance/Financial Aid); I28 (Government Policy)
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In 2009, the United States ranked 14th among Organization for Economic Co-operation
and Development (OECD) nations in the proportion of adults with a college degree, prompting
the Obama administration to launch a campaign aimed at increasing college attainment rates. In a
joint address to Congress that year, President Obama said that by 2020 the United States would
“once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world,” and the Department
of Education (ED) targeted expanding the share of adults with an associate’s degree or higher
from 40 to 60 percent as part of this goal (Obama, 2009; Fry, 2017). In the push toward
advancing this goal, higher education policy discussions in the United States in recent years have
largely centered on issues of college access, completion, and affordability. Although college
participation rates have increased across income levels, the gap in college enrollment and
completion between high- and low-income students has widened (Bailey & Dynarski, 2011).
Fewer than half of high-achieving, low-income students earn a college degree compared to three-
quarters of similarly achieving students from high-income households (Dynarski, 2015). Rapidly
increasing tuition rates raise additional concerns about college affordability, particularly given
the growing number of students relying on loans to finance their education. Many students
struggle to repay that educational debt. More than one-quarter of borrowers have defaulted on at
least one loan after entering repayment, with higher default rates among undergraduates, students
who never earned a credential, and students of color (Federal Student Aid [FSA], 2014; Kelchen
& Li, 2017; National Center for Education Statistics, 2017; Podgursky et al., 2002; Scott-
Clayton, 2018).
Over the past decade, the U.S. federal government has taken substantial steps to improve
access, completion, and affordability by simplifying college and financial aid processes and
reducing informational barriers students face when evaluating college options. These efforts
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expanded under the Obama administration and included the creation of a suite of informational
tools, policies, and interventions intended to help students navigate the college-going process and
make informed decisions on the way to and through college. For instance, changes to the
financial aid process included connecting the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA)
with tax data and revising application timelines. Related efforts led to the development of
consumer information tools designed to help students evaluate college options, such as the
College Scorecard, a website that allows students to search for and compare colleges on
outcomes such as net price, graduation rates, and earnings.1
Many efforts to simplify the college-going process and reduce informational barriers
drew on the behavioral sciences, which incorporate insights from economics, psychology,
cognitive science, and other social sciences, to understand and inform decisionmaking. In this
policy retrospective, we review empirical evidence surrounding federal efforts that applied
behavioral science insights to college and financial aid processes in the United States over the
past decade. Prior reviews have focused on mapping educational investment decisions onto a
behavioral science framework (Jabbar, 2011; Lavecchia, Liu, & Oreopoulos, 2014), the
outcomes of behavioral “nudge units” in Canadian domestic policy (French & Oreopoulos,
2017), and highlighting lessons learned from evaluations of non-profits’ and colleges’
behaviorally informed interventions for future government policy (Castleman, 2017; Castleman
et al., 2017). This paper builds on and extends previous reviews in several ways. First, we
examine specific U.S. federal education policy efforts in the past decade and evidence regarding
1 1998 and 2008 reauthorizations of the Higher Education Act (HEA) included precursors to more defined goals of
the Obama administration related to college-going simplification and information. For example, the College
Navigator, part of the 1998 HEA, is a website aimed at facilitating college search, and “tuition shame lists” – list of
colleges with highest net and list prices – required under 2008 reauthorization can be seen as earlier attempts to
improve transparency and accountability
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their effects on several student outcomes, including college completion, as opposed to previous
reviews that have largely focused on college entry. Second, we discuss the efficacy of different
approaches, highlighting ones that appear particularly promising and estimating the return on
investment needed to make such efforts feasible for government provision in the long run.
Finally, we focus on the public provision of informational tools, policies, and interventions
aimed at helping students to and through college and discuss how public versus private efforts
are likely to shape student outcomes and the continued provision of such services.
In the following section, we begin by providing a brief overview of the behavioral
sciences and their recent applications in public policy. We then discuss how insights from the
behavioral sciences have been applied to higher education settings to help students navigate the
college transition and financial aid processes and the effects of such efforts. Next, we discuss
promising directions for the federal government to further apply behavioral science insights to
improve college outcomes (and potential limitations of this approach), as well as estimate the
benefits that would have to be realized to make government provision of postsecondary
informational tools, policies, and interventions feasible in the long term. Finally, we hypothesize
where efforts to simplify the college-going process and reduce informational barriers are likely
to go under the Trump administration.
BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE: OVERVIEW OF THE FIELD AND RECENT POLICY
TRENDS
The field of behavioral science explores individuals’ engagement around three margins
related to decisionmaking, especially when decisions involve complexity, risk, and uncertainty:
(1) identifying behavioral barriers to making an optimal choice, (2) labeling typical responses to
those barriers, and (3) developing solutions and strategies to overcome those responses.
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At any given moment, individuals are evaluating choices and making many decisions,
often without complete information about the costs and benefits of each option. Researchers have
long documented that people have limited attention, or cognitive bandwidth, available to solve a
particular problem (Kahneman, 2012; Mullainathan & Shafir, 2013). Many factors affect the
cognitive bandwidth people are able to dedicate to decisionmaking – for instance, time limits,
hunger, or stress from poverty (Gennetian & Shafir, 2015; Mullainathan & Shafir, 2013;
Schilbach, Schofield, & Mullainathan, 2016). Limited cognitive bandwidth creates barriers to
making fully informed and rational decisions. Individuals thus often make decisions using
“bounded rationality,” that is, rational given a set of practical constraints (Simon, 1982;
Kahneman, 2003).
Kahneman and Tversky’s influential work in the 1970s (e.g., 1974, 1979) explored how
the framing and context of choices affect how people respond to complicated decisions under
constraint or uncertainty. Individuals might put off a making a decision or taking action, deterred
by hassles associated with carefully evaluating options and believing they will handle complexity
better tomorrow, and fail to follow-up with an active choice (Karlan et al., 2016; Thaler &
Benartzi, 2004). They might also rely on heuristics, or “rules of thumb,” to evaluate options and
make choices (Kahneman, 2012). These heuristics include, among others:
Availability bias: Someone might use easily accessible information rather than
spending time and bandwidth needed to find more informative data (Tversky &
Kahneman, 1974). For example, a student deciding what colleges to apply to might
rely on the anecdotes or experiences of friends or older siblings with the college
search rather than seeking out other perspectives. Indeed, the college choices of
younger siblings often mirrors that of older siblings, especially when it comes to
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enrolling in a four-year college and admissions selectivity of a college (Goodman,
Hurwitz, Smith, & Fox, 2015).
Anchors and reference points: An individual might evaluate a choice differently when
it is compared to different options. Put another way, whether you call a tomato a fruit
or a vegetable often depends on whether it is sitting next to an apple or a beet. When
considering college options, a family might determine whether the cost of attendance
is acceptable at a nearby four-year college differently by whether it is compared to a
two-year college (which is likely to have comparatively low tuition) or a private four-
year college (which is likely to have comparatively high tuition) (Ariely,
Loewenstein, & Prelec, 2006).
Default and status quo bias: Often, when faced with complexity, people fail to make
an active choice – sticking with the default or status quo option (Samuelson &
Zeckhauser, 1988; Thaler & Sunstein, 2008). For example, students deciding where
to enroll in college may select the closest school rather than evaluating which
institution best matches their goals or aspirations.
Acknowledging these tendencies, academics as well as public and private sector
practitioners have developed and implemented various behavioral nudges and interventions that
shift how individuals encounter choices, often taking advantage of heuristics to encourage an
optimal choice (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008). By identifying behaviorally rooted challenges that
people face, organizations can then make structural program changes (simplifying processes,
changing the default, removing hassle factors) and/or support individuals’ decisionmaking
process (sending timely, salient, and actionable reminders, developing commitment devices, and
prompting active choices).
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While behavioral interventions have the potential to improve individual welfare, they also
have the potential to improve the general welfare by affecting the externalities associated with
sub-optimal decisionmaking, such as reducing the need for public health welfare interventions if
individuals stop engaging in unhealthy behaviors (Furman, 2017). Given this distributed interest,
a growing movement across the globe supports the application of behavioral insights toward
improving public policy outcomes, in areas such as nutrition, credit card and mortgage
disclosures, automobile purchases, and the take-up rates of government social programs. This
groundswell has resulted in several countries (including the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada,
and Germany) establishing nudge units that focus on implementing and evaluating behavioral
science innovations in government policy, and is also reflected in the growing use of behavioral
insights to inform the work of international institutions such as the World Bank and the OECD.
In 2014, the Obama administration launched the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST) in
the United States to collaborate with federal agencies to implement and evaluate behavioral
interventions aimed at improving the effectiveness and efficiency of government programs.2 The
following year (2015), an executive order more broadly encouraged federal agencies in the
United States to consider ways of applying behavioral insights to improve public policy
outcomes. Most of these nudge units, including the SBST, emphasize rigorous evaluations of
behavioral interventions, aiding in the growing movement toward evidence-based social
programs and policies (Haskins, 2017; see also Gopalan & Pirog, 2017 for an overview of U.S.
efforts to apply the behavioral sciences to social policy, and a framework for doing so).
BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE AND FEDERAL HIGHER EDUCATION POLICY
2 The change in presidential administrations resulted in the disbanding of SBST.
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In postsecondary education, policies aimed at simplifying the college-going process and
reducing informational barriers represent low-cost, often bipartisan efforts intended to improve
college access, completion, and affordability. Such efforts often draw on behavioral sciences to
help students navigate college decisions. Given little interest within the U.S. Congress in
expanding funding for student financial aid programs, behaviorally informed policies and
interventions present a promising way to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of existing
programs focused on access and affordability (Dynarski & Wiederspan, 2012). In this section,
we review steps in the college-going process, from initial application to loan repayment, and
empirical evidence of how recent behaviorally informed federal policies and interventions
enacted during the Obama administration affected student outcomes.
Students, particularly low-income, first generation, and minority students, often struggle
with successfully applying to, matriculating to, paying for, and graduating from college in the
United States for many reasons. Students must first decide to pursue postsecondary education,
then evaluate a set of institutions to apply to, complete federal, state, and institution-specific
financial aid paperwork, potentially undergo FAFSA verification, decide where to attend, decide
whether and how much to borrow, complete graduation requirements, and repay loans taken out
along the way. At any of these points, students can encounter behavioral and informational
barriers that disrupt their educational trajectory, a particular concern for low-income, first-
generation, and minority students who interact with fewer college counselors and often lack
family knowledge about the college-going process (Castleman & Page, 2014; Lareau, 2003;
Ross, White, Wright, & Knapp, 2013).
Over the past decade, researchers have extensively documented this complex college-
going process, highlighting these behavioral and informational barriers and developing
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interventions to facilitate the transition to and through college (e.g., Bettinger et al., 2012;
Castleman & Page, 2016, 2015; Castleman, Page, & Schooley, 2014; Dynarski & Scott-Clayton,
2006). Many of these interventions have focused on providing students with access to quality
college advisors, with either in person or virtual opportunities to address specific questions about
the college transition (e.g., Barr & Castleman, 2016). Others have focused on pushing
information about the college search and high-quality college options out to high-achieving, low-
income students who are unlikely to have access to an individual who would otherwise find and
share that information with them (e.g., Hoxby & Turner, 2013).
Research increasingly shows interventions that occur early on in the college-going
process affect subsequent steps and the ultimate likelihood of degree completion. For instance,
informational packets about college options not only affected where students applied, but where
they enrolled, with treated students attending schools with higher graduation rates and larger per
pupil instructional and student support expenditures (Hoxby & Turner, 2013). Attending a more
selective institution often means students are more likely to eventually earn a degree – just
meeting the test score threshold for eligibility to a four-year versus two-year college in Georgia
substantially increased the likelihood those students would earn a bachelor’s degree within six
years, particularly for low-income and black students (Goodman, Hurwitz, & Smith, 2016).3 This
logic – that early interventions serve to shift educational trajectories and can affect long-term
completion – underlies much of the federal policy efforts around the college search and
application margin.
3 Given high loan default rates among individuals who do not complete a degree and the cost of additional years of
education without necessarily experiencing an income boost from completing a degree, the benefit of policies that
induce enrollment among marginal students but fail to affect completion is ambiguous and merits more attention.
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In the following section, we discuss recent U.S. federal policy efforts aimed at
simplifying the college-going process and helping students make informed decisions and present
the empirical evidence of how these policies affect college outcomes, emphasizing variations
across interventions and for various student populations. In Table 1, we summarize these recent
policy efforts along the college transition and completion timeline, as well as the behavioral
obstacles they target, and the behavioral principles the policies embody.
Table 1 about here
Getting To and Through College: College Application, Enrollment, and Completion
Acknowledging informational barriers in the college search process, the U.S. Department
of Education launched the College Scorecard in September 2015. Originally intended as a
college-rating tool to identify high- and low-performing colleges and warn low-performing
colleges they could lose access to federal student aid funds, backlash over federal college ratings
led the Obama administration and ED to revamp the Scorecard to serve as a consumer
information tool. The final product was an information portal that enables students to search for
colleges by location, size, or other attributes, such as whether the school is public, private, or
religiously affiliated. Each institution has a profile page that features average cost, graduation
rate, and post-graduation earnings benchmarked against the national average, with the option to
compare institutions or view more details for one college.
In theory, the Scorecard addresses several behavioral barriers to a successful college
search, application, and college completion process. The tool is user-friendly, and provides
appropriate anchors or reference points against which students can assess a college’s
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performance (e.g., comparing a school’s graduation rate to the national average), potentially
nudging students toward schools that score higher on performance metrics and away from poor-
performing institutions. The Scorecard also enables students to access information in digestible
phases (e.g., using a filter to search for schools, previewing three key metrics, and then letting
students dig deeper into colleges they find interesting). This allows students to focus on a small
amount of information at a time, reducing the cognitive bandwidth required to sift through vast
amounts of text.
However, researchers have not yet detected dramatic shifts in college search or
application behaviors associated with the Scorecard’s introduction. On the search margin,
Huntington-Klein (2016) measured Google Search Trends for 3,595 two- and four-year
institutions in the Scorecard dataset before and after Scorecard introduction. He found significant
but small increases in searches for colleges with lower tuition, higher graduation rates, and
higher earnings. At the application margin, researchers used SAT “score sends” as proxies for
applications and found similarly small but significant effects, with 2.4 percent more SAT test
scores sent to schools with higher earnings but no effect on score send behavior in response to an
institutions’ cost or graduation rate information (Hurwitz & Smith, 2018). They found effects
concentrated among schools with a low proportion of underrepresented minority students or a
low proportion of students eligible for free- or reduced-price lunch and among Asian and White
students and students with higher SAT scores. They did not find significant effects on the college
enrollment margin.
These papers suggest that while the Scorecard had a small effect on college search and
application behaviors, those effects were concentrated among relatively high-achieving and
economically advantaged students, and may contribute to widening socioeconomic gaps in
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college matriculation. As the authors note, the relatively unimpressive effects of the Scorecard
contrasted with other successful proactive college outreach campaigns may reflect differences in
how students access information. While active, more involved informational interventions have
typically pushed outreach directly to students via mailings, text messages, and sometimes by
interactions with college advisors (e.g., Castleman & Page, 2015; Hoxby & Turner, 2013), the
Scorecard relies on students to seek out information on their own. Students of all income levels
may benefit from well-organized information to guide college decisionmaking, but delivery
systems matter, and low-income students are more likely to realize benefits from proactive
outreach.
While the intended purpose of the Scorecard is to help students during the college search
and application process by identifying colleges that are a good fit for them and allowing them to
compare colleges on a variety of metrics, it may also indirectly influence college completion. If
giving students information about college outcomes nudges them to apply to and subsequently
enroll in colleges with better outcomes (e.g., higher graduation rates), it may improve the
likelihood that students graduate. It is still too soon to evaluate the Scorecard and other consumer
information tools outlined in the following section for an effect on graduation rates; however, if
such efforts are able to shift students into attending colleges with better outcomes, it may be an
effective policy lever to affect degree attainment. If, however, the Scorecard and similar efforts
primarily benefit relatively advantaged students, as recent evidence seems to indicate, it could
exacerbate existing inequalities in college access and completion.
Footing the Bill: Financial Aid and College Financing
After searching for and applying to college, many students encounter challenges
navigating the complex and multi-step financial aid application process in order to pay for
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college. The FAFSA is a lengthy, cumbersome application (more than 100 questions) that
students must complete to apply for federal student aid. In the face of this complexity, many
students who would benefit from federal student aid simply do not complete FAFSA (Bird &
Castleman, 2016; Dynarski & Scott-Clayton, 2006; Kofoed, 2016). Even after filing,
approximately 30 percent of filers are selected (some randomly, some due to incomplete
applications) for income verification requiring them to submit additional paperwork to assess
their financial need (Page, Castleman, & Meyer, 2016). Researchers and college advising
organizations have long advocated that the FAFSA undergo simplification to ease hassles
associated with completing the application and accessing financial aid.
The U.S. Congress and the ED have made progress toward simplifying the process of
applying for federal student aid. These changes include incorporating skip logic into the online
application form to reduce the number of questions students encounter, launching a data tool that
provides school counselors with updated FAFSA completion rates at their schools, and
connecting FAFSA with tax records via the Internal Revenue Service Data Retrieval Tool (IRS-
DRT) (Dynarski & Wiederspan, 2012). The IRS-DRT integration in particular helps ensure
accurate FAFSA reporting; the IRS-DRT website touts the main benefits of the tool as reducing
FAFSA mistakes and ensuring that students selected for verification will not need to provide
additional tax information.
In 2016, via executive action, the Department of Education began accepting FAFSAs as
early as October as opposed to a previous January start date, and calculated aid based on the
previous year’s (termed prior-prior year, or “PPY”) tax information. The shift in application start
date gave students more time to complete the form, and by using PPY tax information, students
could receive an earlier estimate of their aid eligibility, resulting in a financial aid application
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timeline more closely tied to college admission cycles. Unfortunately, this change was
accompanied by a temporary but months-long mid-filing cycle shut down of the IRS data
retrieval tool in spring 2017, attributed to cybersecurity concerns. Because the introduction of the
new filing timeline, previous year tax reporting, and IRS data retrieval tool occurred at the same
time, it is challenging to separately measure the effects of these changes on FAFSA filing rates.
FAFSA filing did increase by about nine percent in 2017 above the 2016 cycle – adding about an
additional 17,500 filers - and early evidence suggested that schools enrolling a higher proportion
of White students and schools in high-income districts experienced larger increases in FAFSA
filing associated with the earlier deadline and PPY tax information policy shifts (Hillman, 2017;
Hillman, Bruecker, & Crespin-Trujillo, 2017). However, simulations suggest using PPY tax
information alone is unlikely to substantially change aid awards (Kelchen & Jones, 2015).
In addition to large-scale efforts toward structural financial aid application change, the
Department of Education has also rolled out consumer information tools aimed at helping
students understand aid and compare costs across colleges. One of these tools is a “shopping
sheet” – a letter developed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Department of
Education to simplify financial aid award offers that colleges send students describing net costs
and financing options. Financial aid award offers often lack information about cost of attendance
and many do not clearly distinguish loans from grants; they typically vary from college to
college and provide different information and use different language to describe financial aid,
making it difficult for students and their families to assess costs and financing options (Fishman
et al., 2018). In addition to providing simplified and standardized information about net costs and
borrowing options, the shopping sheet also includes information about college outcomes, such as
graduation and loan default rates, relative to other colleges. The shopping sheet incorporates
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many lessons from behavioral science – for example, the comparison of an individual college’s
outcomes to a national average creates a reference point or anchor that helps students evaluate
whether a school’s graduation rate is high or low relative to other colleges. The uniformity of the
sheet across institutions also allows for an “apples-to-apples” comparison of different schools’
offers and outcomes, much as the Scorecard does on the application margin, without having to
seek out additional information that is often not readily available (e.g., cost of attendance).
The shopping sheet, created as part of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008’s
mandate to simplify award letters, was voluntary, and institutions chose whether to use the
format to award financial aid. Initially, more than 700 institutions adopted the shopping sheet,
including state systems of public higher education institutions in Maryland, Massachusetts, New
York, and Texas. Today, more than 3,000 postsecondary institutions send the shopping sheet to
students in an effort to clarify information about costs, borrowing options, and student outcomes.
These institutions enroll 75 percent of undergraduates in the United States and represent nearly
half of postsecondary institutions (Department of Education, 2016). Most colleges that have
adopted the shopping sheet send it to all undergraduate and graduate students receiving aid while
some provide it only to students receiving federal military and veteran educational benefits as
part of the Obama administration’s efforts to ensure information about federal benefits for
military personnel. Research indicates the shopping sheet has had relatively small effects on
students’ enrollment and borrowing decisions at community colleges (Rosinger, 2017), likely
because students typically attend the closest community college and have few other options
available in the local area if graduation rates or other outcomes at the college are poor (Hillman,
2016). At four-year colleges, the shopping sheet related to a decrease in borrowing at colleges
with riskier outcomes and at colleges serving larger shares of underrepresented students
16
(Rosinger, 2018). Relatively mixed results at two- and four-year colleges possibly reflect the fact
that although the intervention is more proactive than the Scorecard (that is, information is sent
directly to students rather than students having to actively seek out information), it still requires
students to interpret and make sense of information on their own, and students at four-year
colleges on average may have access to more resources to assist in this.
While FAFSA reform and government support for informational tools focus on reducing
the bureaucratic hassles and informational barriers students encounter while navigating the
financial aid process, other interventions have focused on the importance of outreach and
encouragement. Given limited attention on a given day, individuals often need targeted
reminders and outreach to help them dedicate time to complete important tasks. A few timely
text messages or emails prompting FAFSA and other financial aid form filing and have resulted
in increased filing and college engagement across various settings (Bird et al., 2017; Castleman,
Meyer, & Sullivan, 2017; ideas42, 2015; Page, Castleman, & Meyer, 2016). For $5-10 per
student, text message reminders have increased low-income students’ college enrollment by up
to six percentage points and first-generation students’ enrollment by around eight percentage
points (Castleman & Page, 2015). Given this body of evidence, former First Lady Michelle
Obama launched the “Up Next” campaign, sending text message reminders about college
preparation and financial aid resources and deadlines to high school seniors to prompt them to
take action around important tasks and deadlines. Early descriptive evidence indicates that
relative to students who did not sign up for the text messages, students participating in various
Up Next campaigns were 12 percentage points more likely to file the FAFSA, seven percentage
points more likely to enroll in college, and 14 percentage points more likely to remain enrolled
through their sophomore year of college (Nudge4, 2016).
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Debt Free: Loan Repayment
Many U.S. students leave college having accrued some form of debt – the current
national student loan debt sits above a staggering $1.3 trillion (Federal Reserve Bank of New
York, 2017). While taking on debt can be a smart decision, more than one in ten borrowers from
the 2013 cohort defaulted on their loans, facing potential repercussions such as wage
garnishment and reductions in their credit scores (FSA, 2014). Default rates are higher for
undergraduate borrowers, for students who attend for-profit institutions, for students who do not
graduate, and for students of color, particularly black students (FSA, 2014; Kelchen & Li, 2017;
Podgursky et al., 2002; Scott-Clayton, 2018).
Recognizing the negative and inequitably distributed consequences of default,
researchers, policymakers, and advocacy groups have advanced numerous policy proposals.
These include changing the default repayment plan to an income-based option, setting up
automatic payment directly from paychecks, and reducing the number of repayment options to a
single plan (Boatman, Evans, & Soliz, 2014). These recommendations draw on behavioral
science research demonstrating that default options are difficult to overcome, that reducing the
number of options simplifies decisionmaking, and that reducing hassles can increase the
likelihood of individuals making active choices (Bettinger et al., 2012).
In 2015 and 2016, the Department of Education, in conjunction with the SBST,
conducted multiple pilot interventions aimed at increasing enrollment in income-driven
repayment and a revised “pay as you earn” repayment (REPAYE) options, which structure
payments relative to income. The Department randomly assigned more than three million
borrowers to control or email prompt conditions, and saw a nine percent increase in applications
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for income-driven repayment plans among borrowers who had previously indicated an interest in
income-driven repayment options (SBST, 2016a). The campaign also tested different messaging
to borrowers based on their characteristics, and found that loss aversion messaging (e.g., “Avoid
making monthly student loan payments of more than 10 percent of your income”) resulted in a
20 percent increase in income-driven repayment plan applications among individuals who were
already in forbearance on their loans (SBST, 2016a). Similar emails reminding people to re-
certify their repayment plans by updating information about income and family size increased re-
certification rates by 8.3 percent (SBST, 2016a).
DISCUSSION
This policy retrospective highlights the increasing influence of behavioral science
research on federal postsecondary education policy and empirical evidence of how recent
behaviorally informed policy changes affect student outcomes. Behavioral science tackles issues
of decisionmaking under less-than-ideal circumstances – when individuals have time constraints,
other pressing issues demanding attention, incomplete information about options, and limited
resources to evaluate and compare the quality of information they do have. The college-going
process is complex, and it is unsurprising that students and their families struggle to navigate
various stages on the way to and through college, including searching for and applying to
college, applying for and renewing financial aid, and repaying loans.
Federal policy under the Obama administration aimed to improve college access,
affordability, and completion by decreasing complexity (e.g., simplify financial aid forms and
processes), prompting action (e.g., emails about reviewing loan repayment options), providing
guidance and reference points to help students evaluate options (e.g., publishing the Scorecard,
distributing shopping sheets), and providing psychological encouragement and support to
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students about the college transition (e.g., Mrs. Obama’s Up Next outreach campaign). The
widespread and sometimes simultaneous implementation of many of these programs make it
challenging to measure the individual effects of each on college going and the relative nascency
of these initiatives means we are unable to currently evaluate their effects on longer-term student
outcomes. For example, since the Scorecard rolled out in September 2015, spring 2020
represents the earliest one could measure the effect of the tool on four-year graduation rates.
Current evaluations suggest most of these changes resulted in positive outcomes – students
applying to colleges with higher graduation rates and more borrowers making active choices
about their loan repayment options. However, researchers have not yet detected an effect of these
policies on key margins of educational attainment - college enrollment and college graduation
rates.
Furthermore, many of these studies also point to inequitable benefits to consumer
information tools – with the Scorecard primarily benefiting white and Asian students, early
FAFSA increasing filing rates at higher-income high schools, and shopping sheet benefits
concentrated among students attending four-year colleges. These inequitably distributed benefits
suggest that for policy shifts to advance equity and improve outcomes for less-advantaged
students, they should also include active outreach campaigns to get tools in the hands of students
who need them most. Without active outreach, consumer information tools risk expanding
educational inequalities by nudging already relatively advantaged students into better performing
institutions while doing little to change the educational trajectories of less-advantaged students.
Policymakers contemplating incorporating behavioral science insights into higher
education programs and initiatives should consider both the program costs and return on
investment as well as the pros and cons of public versus private provision of goods and services.
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One of the attractive features of behaviorally informed interventions and policies is their
relatively low cost compared to large-scale, structural change. Ultimately, the decision whether
to invest federal funds in behaviorally-informed strategies should consider what other alternative
uses of those funds are - for example, investing more in federal financial aid. One common
metric for evaluating the cost-effectiveness of postsecondary education interventions is the
percentage point change in enrollment (or other outcomes) associated with a $1,000 investment
(see Leslie & Brinkman, 1988; Dynarski, 2003; and Deming & Dynarski, 2009 for reviews using
this method). For example, a $1,000 benefit from the Social Security Student Benefit Program
caused a 3.6 percentage point increase in college enrollment (Dynarski, 2003), and $1,000 tuition
decrease resulted in a roughly four percentage point increase in college enrollment (Kane, 1995).
In an analysis of behavioral strategies leveraged by the United States and United
Kingdom nudge units, researchers similarly used the $1,000 investment benchmark, but
translated results from studies into the number of additional students enrolling in college for
every $1,000 spent (Benartzi et al., 2017). They found large benefits to behaviorally informed
projects relative to implementation costs, especially when compared to traditional policy
solutions (Benartzi et al., 2017). For example, an experiment that helped low-income families
complete FAFSA during tax filing resulted in an 8.1 percentage point increase in college
enrollment, or an additional 1.53 students enrolled in college per $1,000 spent (Benartzi et al.,
2017; Bettinger et al., 2012). They compare this with an additional 0.035 students enrolled in
college because of the Social Security Student Benefit Program (Dynarski, 2003). Analyses of
the effectiveness of federal consumer tools or attempts to reduce complexity should use a similar
scale for comparison and decision making about the most effective use of federal higher
education dollars.
21
Beyond measuring the costs and benefits of federal initiatives on student outcomes of
interest, evaluating the most effective use of funds requires pricing out some of these policies.
While it can be difficult to estimate the exact cost of the federal initiatives highlighted in this
review, many have intuitively low price tags. The College Scorecard uses data already collected
through federal surveys, adjusting the framing of emails about loan repayment option is virtually
costless (other than staff time to draft messages), and the Up Next messaging campaign likely
cost around $5 per student (based on estimates from similar text messaging campaigns; see
Castleman & Page, 2015). Obtaining additional cost information is easier with the
implementation of the DATA Act and various tools available on USAspending.gov; however, it
is still challenging to identify expenditures for specific components of the various informational
tools, policies, and interventions we discuss. For example, the Integrated Postsecondary
Education Data System (IPEDS) contract to the Research Triangle Institute runs 6.5 years at
about $80.7 million, and includes work related to constructing the College Scorecard dataset, but
it is unclear what portion of the overall contract is for College Scorecard as opposed to work
necessary for IPEDS maintenance, annual data collection, and staffing. Many of the
interventions discussed - including the Scorecard and shopping sheet – also involved upfront
costs to design and build but are likely less expensive to maintain and update once created.
Given the difficulty of pricing out many of these interventions, we also propose
evaluating what benefit an intervention would need to have for a $1,000 investment to prove
more successful than investments in traditional aid programs. For example, for the College
Scorecard to be more effective at inducing college enrollment than an additional $1,000 in grant
aid, the program would probably need to increase enrollment by at least four percentage points -
while this point estimate is within the range of those estimated using College Board data, those
22
estimates are very imprecise (Hurwitz & Smith, 2018). Of course, not all federal higher
education dollars need to target the same margin and likely should be spread across different
decision points along the path through college search, enrollment, graduation, and post-
graduation financial management. The College Scorecard could very well be considered a
success even without effects on college enrollment if it achieves policy goals of shifting
application behaviors.
An additional advantage of behaviorally informed policies and interventions is their
political feasibility, even in the midst of increasingly partisan legislative debates. The low-cost of
many behavioral solutions make the field appealing to more conservative policymakers who may
appreciate the fact that many behavioral science interventions focus on increasing active and
informed choice in educational investments. In addition to having a comparatively lower price
tag, the effects of many behavioral insights could even result in government revenue or reduced
expenditures. The UK nudge unit applied behavioral design strategies to tax letters and fine
notices, which not only resulted in increased fine payment but also cut down on repeat notice
printing costs and the human resource expenditures necessary to follow-up on delinquent
payments (BIT, 2015). Large-scale, structural policies addressing college access, affordability,
and completion are important and necessary to address to reduce educational disparities.
However, given bipartisan support for improving information and simplifying the college and
financial aid processes make them more likely to move ahead.
Many of the federal policies and initiatives developed by the Obama administration
mirror goods and services offered by the private sector. The final version of the College
Scorecard moved away from explicit rankings of colleges, but inherent in the presentation of
information are comparisons across institutions. Yet similar information about college size,
23
tuition, starting salaries, and graduation rate is available from U.S. News & World Report and
numerous other organizations. Policymakers might reasonably debate why public provision of
this information is necessary, especially given budget constraints.
First, the empirical research highlighted in this review indicates that the rollout of
Obama-era informational tools such as the Scorecard did have some effect on students’ college
search process, suggesting that the private provision of similar information was not meeting all
of students’ and their families’ needs. Second, many college programs have misreported
information to these rankings organizations; when detected, often their rankings are removed and
administrators can face termination, but there are undoubtedly many undetected instances of
false information published. While institutions could also misreport data to IPEDS, which feeds
into the College Scorecard, there are severe consequences in terms of Title IV funding and fines
for doing so. Third, the public provision of information may enable and inspire improved private
services; in the fall of 2016, Google integrated Scorecard information into individual college
search results, and in the spring of 2018 the company expanded the amount of Scorecard data
incorporated (King, 2016; Schonberg, 2018).
Recent Legislative Action and Federal Opportunities
As the United States continues with a new presidential administration, prepares for 2018
midterm Congressional elections, and faces an overdue Higher Education Act reauthorization,
open questions remain about the role of behavioral science in informing and shaping future
higher education policy. Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN), chair of the Senate Committee on
Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), has emphasized the importance of timely
reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, which governs federal student aid programs, and
has been a prominent, long-time supporter of FAFSA simplification. Recent reauthorization talks
24
have heavily featured discussions around financial aid transparency and simplification (HELP,
2018).
Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) introduced the College Transparency Act (S.1121) in May
2017, which proposes, among other simplification strategies, requiring colleges to use a
standardized financial aid offer form, like the shopping sheet, in awarding aid in an effort to
improve clarity around college costs and support informed college choices. The act also proposes
requiring reporting of publicly available information about college- and program-level outcomes
for all students (as opposed to the Scorecard that lists outcomes for students receiving aid
through a federal student aid program). In the House, Representative Lloyd Doggett (D-TX)
introduced complementary legislation through the Equitable Student Aid Access Act (H.R.2015),
which would codify executive action under the Obama administration relating to early FAFSA
and prior-prior year tax usage and expand eligibility for an “automatic zero” expected family
contribution to simplify and reduce hassles around FAFSA completion. Neither piece of
legislation has moved forward since introduction, though the College Transparency Act has
received growing bipartisan support in the Senate (Kreighbaum, 2018).
In December 2017, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) and Rep. Brett Futhrie (R-KY)
introduced the Promoting Real Opportunity, Success, and Prosperity through Education Reform
(PROSPER) Act (H.R. 4508). The proposed act highlights student aid simplification as a main
goal, introducing the idea of a FAFSA app and recommending a “one grant, one loan, and one
work-study system” to “ease confusion” for students, which mirrors some of the
recommendations made by the research community (Committee on Education and the
Workforce, 2017; Boatman, Evans, & Soliz, 2014). The PROSPER Act also proposes the
establishment of a College Dashboard, which would replace the existing College Navigator
25
information platform, but does not specifically address the College Scorecard. Generally, the
Dashboard proposal includes more data points than the Scorecard (for example, student-faculty
ratios, enrollment by student characteristics, and earnings disaggregated by academic program)
(IHEP, 2017). However, the availability of multiple federal college comparison interfaces, each
sharing different types of information, represents an increase in complexity; improvements on
existing systems represents a more behaviorally-informed approach to improving student
knowledge about college characteristics and outcomes. Unlike the Hatch and Doggett proposals,
the PROSPER Act has moved to committee action, with the House Committee on Education and
the Workforce issuing a report on the bill; however, as of writing the bill has not come to vote.
CONCLUSION
Despite extensive research into the role of behavioral science in affecting student
outcomes, many questions remain. As this review suggests, there is a growing body of evidence
on how students respond to simplified processes and timely, salient information. At the same
time, there is not comparable information on how colleges have responded. The College
Scorecard grew out of a college accountability framework, with the hope that making
information about college outcomes more visible would inspire colleges to adapt their
management to improve affordability and student outcomes to obtain favorable ratings. The
extent to which institutions actually change in the face of publicized information on performance
remains to be seen. Furthermore, questions linger about the ethics of nudging, with public
opinion generally supportive but variable based on the wielders of behavioral tools
(Jachimowicz, 2017; Sunstein, 2016).
While many of these policies focused on the college application and enrollment margins,
future work should examine whether any shifts in access translated into shifts in completion
26
rates. For many Obama-era policies, it is simply too early to tell if they affected completion,
although measures of first- to second-year persistence would provide suggestive evidence of
completion likelihood. Researchers could also calculate estimated completion rates for induced
enrollees; for example, for every 10 students induced to enroll at a school with an 80 percent
graduation rate, one could reasonably expect an additional eight students to graduate as an upper
bound. In addition to using measures of degree completion, researchers might consider the extent
to which these college search and application tools affect other quality measures of an institution,
such as the income mobility measures developed by Chetty et al. (2017) that focus both on the
extent to which colleges’ provide educational access to economically disadvantaged students and
the extent to which they provide upward mobility for these same students.
There is much uncertainty about the future of the various behaviorally informed policy
shifts we highlight in this article. Some shifts have persisted, such as the early FAFSA
application timeline. Despite technological issues with the IRS-DRT during spring 2017, the tool
is back in use as of writing. The Department of Education published updated College Scorecard
information in September 2017, notable since updates or maintenance of the tool is not mandated
by law. The Department also announced a mobile FAFSA app that will be available for the
upcoming FAFSA application cycle that may make it easier for students to complete FAFSA on
the go (Kreighbaum, 2017). Many principles from behavioral sciences research could offer
helpful suggestions for the design and rollout of the app; for example, strategically picking
default options for questions to speed up the time to complete or integrating push notifications to
remind families about missing components to complete.
While this review focused on federal policy pertaining to higher education policies, the
Department of Education has identified K-12 school choice as a top policy priority with the
27
confirmation of Betsy DeVos, a prominent advocate of school choice, to head the department.
The behavioral science that informed the development of higher education consumer information
tools could be applied to guide families through the educational decisionmaking process in
earlier grades. Already informational tools such as the Quality Rating and Improvement System
for early childhood education exist to help states and communities evaluate educational quality,
and we envision these will be important and could even expand to more consumer-facing tools
under an administration focused on school choice. Recent evaluations of high school choice and
informational interventions suggest that all students benefited from simplified information and
targeted recommendations, though as with many of the higher education interventions there was
evidence of comparatively economically advantaged students benefiting more (Corcoran,
Jennings, Cohodes, & Sattin-Bajaj, 2018).
As noted in the introduction, the Obama administration set ambitious goals for improving
U.S. college completion rates, aiming to have 60 percent of adults hold an associate’s degree or
higher and to have the highest overall degree attainment rates among OECD countries. While
progress has been made toward this goal - in 2016, 48 percent of young adults held an associate’s
degree or higher and the United States now ranks 10th among OECD countries in the proportion
of young adults with a college degree - more work remains. We believe behavioral science has
an important role to play in affecting students’ postsecondary engagement, particularly in
supplementing structural changes. For example, while recent changes in the FAFSA filing
timeline provided students with more time to complete the form, this large shift may be unlikely
to change behavior absent accompanying informational campaigns and nudges improving
students’ understanding of the new system and reminding them to file earlier. Governments and
colleges can leverage behavioral science to increase awareness of student financial aid initiatives
28
and support services and programs, provided more involved, structural policy changes occur to
provide services in the first place.
29
Table 1: Behaviorally informed federal higher education policy
Phase in college
process
Behavioral obstacle Policy response Behavioral
principles
College application &
enrollment
Students and families
lack time and
information to
evaluate college
quality and fit
College Scorecard
(consumer
information tool)
Simplify
presentation of
information
Compile
information from
multiple sources
Provide anchor
points to evaluate
college outcomes
Financial aid &
college financing
Students and families
struggle to complete
complicated financial
aid forms
Simplify financial aid
forms (IRS data
retrieval tool, prior-
prior year tax
information)
Decrease form
complexity
Students and families
lack time and
information to
evaluate financial aid
offers
Shopping sheet
(consumer
information tool)
Simplify
presentation of
information
Provide anchor
points to evaluate
college outcomes
Students and families
lack knowledge about
financial aid
deadlines and
consequences
Timely text message
and mailed reminders
to complete FAFSA
Prompt action
Provide
psychological
support and
encouragement
Student loan
repayment
Borrowers lack
information about
repayment options
Timely emails about
repayment plan
eligibility
Prompt action
30
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