What is Giving Compass?
We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. Learn more about us.
Giving Compass' Take:
• ideas 42,Nudge 4 , and the Heckscher Foundation for Children present this guide walking through the implementation of proven behavioral interventions to help students get to and through college.
• How can philanthropy support the implementation of these tactics on college campuses? What are the highest return interventions?
• Learn about MDRC's BIAS project aimed at gaining insights into human behavior.
Practitioners who work on postsecondary education access and success know that students face many obstacles on the path to and through college. Whether large or small, these obstacles result in distressingly familiar outcomes that often seem avoidable but are stubbornly persistent. These outcomes include things like:
- A talented high school student does not apply to college because she doesn’t perceive herself as “college material.”
- A student who got good grades in high school struggles academically in college and drops out without ever working with a tutor or otherwise seeking help.
- A student gets into college and through the first year but can’t continue because he loses access to financial aid after he doesn’t refile the FAFSA.
These problems are stubborn in part because they’re rooted in patterns of human cognition and behavior that operate outside of our conscious awareness. In recent years, researchers and innovators have begun exploring how insights from behavioral science—the science of how we make decisions and take actions—can be brought to bear on these challenges. The results have been promising: new solutions that target the hidden drivers of student behavior have successfully mitigated a range of obstacles to students’ progress. A strong evidence base now exists for these innovations. The next step is for practitioners like you to put them into practice. That’s why we created this guide.
This guide presents 13 cost-effective, evidence-based behavioral innovations that can help more students reach, complete, and make good financial choices before, during, and after college. For example:
- Ten minutes of one-on-one help with the FAFSA and pre-populated financial aid information can improve the likelihood of both FAFSA submission and college enrollment.
- Myth-busting emails can increase sign-up for work-study programs and other campus resources.
- Warnings offered at the right time along with a clear path to fixing the problem can have surprising impacts on students’ ability to avoid academic violations.
For each behavioral innovation we offer concise information on what it is, what it can do for students, and what steps are needed to carry it out. Our hope is that practitioners like you will use this guide as a first step to incorporating evidence-based behavioral innovations into your programs. The Nudge Hotline offers free support to help you take the next step towards putting these techniques into action with your students.
Behavioral science is the study of how people make decisions and act in the context of a noisy, complicated world. It draws on decades of research in psychology and behavioral economics to create more realistic models for understanding and predicting human behavior. Behavioral science emerged as a dissenting view within the economics profession by challenging the belief that people behave as if they are perfectly rational actors who consider all available information, weigh the pros and cons of all options, make the best choice, and act on it. Instead, behavioral science sees people as mostly rational much of the time, but with significant exceptions that follow predictable patterns.