Here’s a simple strategy for enrolling more low-income students at elite colleges, but why is it so effective?
The University of Michigan sent packets to students telling them they were eligible for free tuition.
Is a packet and a promise enough to change the trajectory of someone’s life?
Roughly two-thirds of low-income Michigan students who received a branded set of materials from the University of Michigan promising free tuition and fees for four years wound up applying — and 27% enrolled, according to a working paper distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Among similar students who didn’t receive the materials, just 26% applied and only 12% enrolled, the study found.
Of the 15 percentage-point difference in enrollment between the two groups, 7 percentage points account for students who would have otherwise gone to a less-selective four-year public college, 4 percentage points account for students who would have gone to a community college and, perhaps worse of all, another 4 percentage points wouldn’t have gone to college at all.
The reasons why elite schools educate a relatively small share of the nation’s low-income college students are complex.
The impact of the HAIL — which stands for High Achieving Involved Leader, but is also a play on the school’s fight song — program on students’ college application decisions jives with other research indicating that the complexity of our financial system may be discouraging qualified students from applying to college, said Susan Dynarski, a public policy, education and economics professor at the University of Michigan and one of the authors of the paper.
The study’s findings come as policy makers and higher-education leaders continue to be concerned about whether colleges and particularly public flagship institutions, like the University of Michigan, are working as engines of social mobility or replicating the inequality that surrounds them.
The front of the packet students received as part of the HAIL experiment.
The free tuition offer inside.
The reasons why elite schools educate a relatively small share of the nation’s low-income college students are complex. Public colleges may need tuition revenue from wealthier and often out-of-state students make up for cuts in funding from their state legislators. Some schools simply don’t offer enough financial aid to make it affordable for this group.
Others are generous, but they are so selective that getting in can be a challenge for a low-income student who doesn’t get the benefits of her privileged peers, like standardized test prep. (Some student advocates have argued that the University of Michigan is in this group).
In other cases, our complex college pricing and financial-aid system means that a low-income student who could get into a selective college and attend for free or at least at an affordable price feels discouraged from doing so. The HAIL experiment offers a way for colleges committed to increasing economic diversity at their schools to address this problem.
“There are groups of students out there who have not only the potential but the full-scale ability,” to attend a college like the University of Michigan, “that just take themselves out of the running because they think they can’t afford this,” said Kedra Ishop, the school’s vice provost for enrollment management.
The results indicate the power that a simple message telegraphing affordability can have on these types of students, Ishop said. The findings could have implications as schools and policy makers across the country consider creating free college programs. At Michigan, Ishop said early results from HAIL, which began in 2015, encouraged officials to create the Go Blue Guarantee, which promises that Michigan students from families earning $65,000 or less will receive free tuition at the school.
The results of the HAIL experiment drive “home the point that families and students need certainty and clarity,” Dynarski said. Still, she wonders if the effect would have been as large if they hadn’t advertised the promise of free tuition directly to students and their families. A statewide free college program wouldn’t necessarily have the same individualized marketing.
“I suspect that the personalized message played a big role in the size of these impacts,” Dynarski said.
The idea for HAIL came out of a conversation early in both Ishop and University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel’s tenure. As Ishop tells it, Schlissel was lamenting that as he traveled around the state there was a perception among students and families that the University of Michigan was unattainably expensive for low-income students, despite offering them the cheapest education in the state other than community college.
They decided to develop a program to challenge that perception. With the help of Dynarski, a nationally-recognized student aid expert, they created HAIL. Some of the program’s most important features include its simple and direct message, its four-year commitment and that parents and principals receive information about the program in addition to students, Dynarski said.
The dynamics of the state of Michigan and the university’s particular place in it created an environment where the program worked particularly well, the paper notes. Thanks in part to its football program, the University of Michigan is well-known among Michigan students so applicants may have been more likely to respond to its offer than one from a less prominent flagship or one in a state where there was a more crowded market of selective schools.
Public high-school students are also required to take the SAT, which they do for free and during school hours. Expensive and complicated testing protocol can often be a barrier to low-income students sitting for the test even if they might score well.
Dyarnski is hopeful other colleges will try to replicate the program in a way that suits their own needs — as long as they have the resources to ensure that luring a student to their school would provide them with good outcomes, both financially and academically. “This is all behavioral tools and advertising, they can be used for good and evil,” she said.
Despite the promising results, there is evidence the University of Michigan and many other public flagship colleges could do more to increase the share of low-income students in its ranks. Low-income students made up 15% of the school’s enrollment in 2016, compared to 38% of students at colleges in all of Michigan, according to the Institute of Higher Education Policy, a think tank focused on equity at colleges.
Earlier this year, a guide created by two students at the school called “Being Not-Rich at UM,” went viral, highlighting the challenges low-income students may face navigating norms at elite colleges.
HAIL and the Go Blue Guarantee are part of a larger effort to ensure the school lives up to its mission as a state public flagship, Ishop said. That includes efforts like offering a scholarship and mentorship program for first-generation students and ensuring that admissions representatives make as many visits to Michigan high schools as they do to high schools across the country.
One way colleges could be sure they’re serving low-income students well, Dynarski said — rigorously studying programs offered to support them. “Schools try lots of things, but we need an experiment to know whether it works or not,” she said.
(Full disclosure: I graduated from the University of Michigan in 2011 and a block M, the school’s logo, is the only tattoo I’ve ever seriously considered. Still, learning about the challenges public flagship colleges face achieving equity has complicated the way I view my experience at the school as a relatively privileged, out-of-state student).