Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Informational Framing During the College Transition

• In Event: 25.040 - It's All in the Messaging: How Colleges Create College (In)Access

Abstract

Technology-facilitated interventions during the summer following high school graduation have shown promise for increasing the likelihood of successful transition to postsecondary education. In order to mitigate summer melt, researchers and practitioners have crafted text message interventions in order to deliver actionable information to college-intending students at key intervals. This experiment considers whether distinct behavioral framing of text messages has a differential impact on postsecondary transition and first semester outcomes for recent high school graduates in a free community and technical college context. The testing of different text messaging frames and the free-college-for-all context constitute contributions to the literature.

Author

• Jenna Weber Kramer, Vanderbilt University