When I first stepped onto my community-college campus, I was overwhelmed. Staring at the course catalogue, I ran through the seemingly infinite number of class combinations I could arrange around my two part-time jobs. I struggled to determine the sequence of classes that would satisfy my major, graduation, and transfer requirements in the most timely and cost-effective manner.
Had I been the Spock of community-college students—possessed with a preternatural ability to process large amounts of information and act dispassionately, unerringly, and with economic precision—it would have been easy.
What I know now, nearly a decade after graduating from community college, is that behavioral science could have helped.
Needless to say, I’m not Spock—and neither are most community-college students. In the time it took me to earn an associate’s degree, I made every behavioral mistake imaginable. Confused by the cascading deadlines for paperwork, payments, registrations, and classes, I missed deadlines for registration and financial aid, dropped courses due to poor attendance and lack of planning, and enrolled in classes I later learned wouldn’t count toward graduation. I remember thinking that if I was finding the process of getting through community college daunting, transferring to a four-year institution and finishing a bachelor’s degree seemed out of the question.
What I know now, nearly a decade after graduating from community college, is that behavioral science could have helped.
Community colleges face formidable challenges in higher education: They have the near-impossible task of educating more (and a more diverse set of) people, doing it on a fraction of the budget of four-year institutions, and preparing students for everything from vocational careers to placement in top-tier four-year colleges.
Adding to these complexities, community-college students themselves comprise a unique demographic: Many are low-income, first-generation college students or returning adult learners; nearly two-thirds hold full- or part-time jobs; and over twice as many students at a public two-year college have dependents compared to those in public four-year institutions. Often, these students don’t have access to traditional support networks—the organizations and people (often friends and family) who can help pay for school or housing, reinforce the importance and attainability of college, and help answer college planning questions.
Put all these factors together, and it’s not surprising that there’s a gap between students’ aspirations and actual behaviors. A report by The Century Foundation finds that 81.4 percent of students entering a community college for the first time plan on completing at least a bachelor’s degree, yet only 11.6 percent of these students actually do. Across the country, only 29 percent of first-time community college students will earn a two-year degree in under three years, and only 39 percent will complete a two- or four-year degree within six years. One study found that starting out at a community college reduces the chance of earning a bachelor’s degree by an astonishing 30 percentage points.
The combination of a complicated environment and a lack of adequate navigational support provides fertile ground for behavioral errors. Many students fail to take advantage of available resources, procrastinate, miss deadlines, plan erroneously, prioritize short-term demands over long-term gains, and stumble over bureaucratic hassle factors—not because success is beyond them but because the challenges can be overwhelming.
Behavioral science interventions in the form of planning prompts, text message reminders, and identity exercises meant to strengthen resilience and grit are low-cost, evidence-based tools that can help students persevere through college. As a member of the Behavioral Insights Team (BIT), I have had the opportunity to help develop and test some of these tools.
Behavioral science interventions in the form of planning prompts, text message reminders, and identity exercises…are low-cost, evidence-based tools that can help students persevere through college.
For instance, in collaboration with Todd Rogers, professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, we tested whether registering a “study supporter” could help students taking remedial courses in the United Kingdom pass their classes. Research shows that an engaged support network—family members, friends, peers, or others—can lead to better student attendance, better test performance, and lower dropout and higher graduation rates. In this case, a study supporter was a friend or family member who received weekly text messages about the student’s course (about tests, or what the student was learning), designed to prompt discussions with the student. Students who had study supporters were 7 percent more likely to pass their courses and were 27 percent more likely to pass their general exams in math and literacy. Encouragingly, this text message trial cost less than $14 per student—a fraction of the cost of repeating courses.
Likewise, students do better when they feel like they belong on campus and in their classes. In partnership with Mike Luca at the Harvard Business School, we found that encouraging text messages emphasizing belonging and planning could increase class attendance by nearly 21 percent over the full year; students who received the text messages were also 16 percent more likely to pass their exams (currently a working paper). These text messages were personalized, sent from the student’s college, and emphasized things like, “At the college, you’re among friends,” and, “Support each other through your studies.” The messages drew upon research that suggests students succeed when they feel like they’re part of a college community, learning something useful, and that their ability can improve with effort.
There’s another powerful benefit to emphasizing belonging and student potential: it can help combat “stereotype threat,” the idea that, when someone’s identity is “activated” in some way (for instance, by stating their gender or race on a test), they can inadvertently confirm negative stereotypes about their social groups and create a self-fulfilling prophecy. This can lead to poorer performance on tests, widening achievement gaps, and lower graduation rates.
Community college students today are still facing some of the same behavioral barriers to timely college completion that I encountered over a decade ago…What if they had a simple nudge to help them along the way?
Reflecting on personal values and one’s potential can help students combat stereotype threat. In a third project, in conjunction with Professor Geoffrey Cohen at Stanford University, we developed an online values-affirmation exercise. In this exercise, students struggling with math and English were asked to think about their most important values. These could include personal relationships or extracurricular interests. Students wrote about times when those values were particularly important to them and why. The exercise increased attendance by as much as 20 percent for those students taking remedial courses in math and English, students who had among the lowest attendance rates. For these students, it seems that focusing on a broader picture of themselves reduced stereotype threat, allowing them to thrive in ways that students who did not participate in the values-affirmation exercise did not.
Internet and text message trials like these are just some examples of low-cost interventions that community colleges can use to encourage engagement and attendance on campus. We have also worked to develop new texting tools, like Promptable, to make these kinds of campaigns more accessible to college administrations and scalable to more students. Other behaviorally informed solutions, such as encouraging early planning or simplifying forms and core requirements, could also help students on their path to college completion.
Yet, despite these promising results, behavioral science is still rarely used in U.S. community colleges.
Now, as a behavioral scientist, I think about my community college classmates and what factors allowed some students to graduate while others didn’t. Community college students today are still facing some of the same behavioral barriers to timely college completion that I encountered over a decade ago. And I can’t help but think: What if they had a simple nudge to help them along the way?
I’m still no Spock—but to me, that just seems logical.
