Sense of Belonging (Strayhorn)
Category: Pathways to and Through Postsecondary
College students often make employment decisions with incomplete information, particularly about compensation. As a result, they may rely on misleading heuristics (such as assuming that interesting or prosocial jobs pay badly) and overlook campus positions that would support both their financial needs and their development. We test whether highlighting job characteristics changes students' application behavior in a preregistered field experiment and find that it does. Increasing the salience of a tutoring job's monetary benefits nearly tripled application rates (a 196% increase). In contrast, messages emphasizing prosocial, career, or social benefits had no effect, despite students reporting these as their primary motivations for applying. The study highlights the incongruencies in college students' decision making alongside a simple, low-cost strategy for recruiting college students to enriching campus jobs.
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/3gr7-1476
