College Readiness Assessment
Category: Pathways to and Through Postsecondary
Complexity and uncertainty loom large in the college application process. We leverage a largescale experiment that reduces administrative burden through a proactive guarantee of admission coupled with tailored information, a simplified application form, and automatic fee waiver to test the impact of emerging “direct admissions” policies. Students were 2.7 percentage points (or 12%) more likely to submit a college application, with larger impacts for racially minoritized, firstgeneration, and low-income students, but were not more likely to ultimately enroll. Given growing adoption, we show these low-cost, low-touch interventions can move the needle on college-going but are insufficient alone to increase enrollment.
Keywords
College access, Common App, direct admissions, post-secondary education, experiment, nudging
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/6xtn-2j84
