Crossing the Finish Line: On the Power of Information and Monetary Incentives to Motivate Action

Project Description:

According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, California is home to 6.4 million adults with some college and no credentials. Within Orange County, the labor market is tight, with a historically low unemployment rate of 2.7%. Locally at our college, enrollment is down 17% since 2017, with the pandemic accelerating much of the decline. Although enrollment is a critical marker of a college's viability, our mission is to help students attain their educational goal and gain meaningful employment with a living wage. With that in mind, we strategically focused our efforts this past summer on students close to completion: those that are two courses away from a certificate or four courses away from a degree. Our approach centers around removing

The information barrier (communicating to each student the specific courses needed for each certificate/degree they are close to completing):

• The cost of enrollment (covering tuition; plus $200 per course to cover books, materials, food, and gas); and

• The cost of attendance (trading off potentially meaningful wages today for deferred cash awards at completion).

The overarching goal is twofold: to boost enrollment and to boost completion. With that in mind, we focused on two distinct student groups: currently enrolled students and those that have stopped out since the pandemic.

The first key hurdle in implementing this initiative was to develop the capability of identifying courses needed for completion. Absent of a degree audit system with batch-processing capability, this involved transcribing award requirements onto a spreadsheet and leveraging internal transcript data to perform a "degree audit" on all students and all programs, taking into account major course requirements and general education (GE) course requirements (Intersegmental GE Transfer Curriculum, California State University GE, or local GE patterns). To gain trust around the developed logic and to improve the accuracy of the prototyped capability, expert counselors were asked to audit the missing courses on a sample of students and provide feedback in multiple iterations.

In our implementation, randomized-controlled experiments were set up to evaluate the effectiveness of different incentive offerings and the effectiveness of various modes of communication. That is, in addition to driving enrollment and completion, our office sought to understand the effectiveness of various aspects of the campaign in order to more efficiently allocate resources for future campaigns.

Results show that personalized, action-specific messaging combined with monetary incentives helps in re-engaging stopped out students and guides them to enroll in courses that lead to degree completion.