What You Don't Know Might Deter You: Information Provision and Minority Retention in Undergraduate Economics

• In Event: Policies and Interventions for Student Persistence in STEM Fields

Abstract

STEM fields have experienced a troubling pattern in recent years: despite high job security, high pay, and high long-run returns, diversity in these fields has remained low. This paper focuses on one potential demand-side friction that could contribute to the representation gap in these fields: misinformed or inaccurate beliefs about STEM fields amongst students from minority racial backgrounds. If students from minority backgrounds lack pre-college exposure to STEM subjects, they may not be fully or correctly informed about the returns to majoring in these fields. Furthermore, stereotypes about the types of jobs associated with these fields or the types of individuals who succeed in them could dissuade uninformed students from pursuing these subjects. This study tests whether low-touch information provision can overcome barriers to persistence in the undergraduate Economics major that may disparately impact underrepresented minority (URM) students. I run two waves of a randomized controlled trial with a total of around 1,200 students enrolled in an introductory undergraduate microeconomics course at a large university. The randomly-assigned intervention is an email containing information on the potential research topics, potential careers, expected income, and diversity of researchers in the Economics field. I use a stratified randomization design that randomizes students within blocks defined by the intersections of gender, URM-status, international status, and highest parental education. The stratification increases the likelihood of balance between the treatment and control groups for relatively small demographic groups that may be the most likely to benefit from the intervention. Through a combination of administrative data and student surveys eliciting beliefs, this paper examines effects of the intervention on short-run course performance and course selection, medium-term majoring decisions, and students' beliefs about the field. For URM students, the information intervention increases the likelihood of enrollment in a subsequent Economics course by 9.9 percentage points, a 38% increase from the enrollment rate for URM students in the control group. Examining this result further, I find strong suggestive evidence that the intervention motivates lower-performing students to enroll. Finally, survey data on students' beliefs about the field reveals that the intervention increases URM students' awareness of unconventional research topics associated with Economics, with no significant shifts in other beliefs. These results are consistent with the theory that information interventions may be most effective for the "marginal" student who is interested in, and theoretically capable of succeeding in, Economics, but in the absence of full information may be deterred from persisting in the field by low performance in introductory Economics courses. The low-touch and easily scalable intervention studied in this paper has the potential to be a relevant policy tool for higher education institutions across states, independent of their relative financial sitution or demographic composition. In this way, the insights from this paper support the conference's broader theme of understanding how to improve outcomes across meaningfully different populations and contexts.

Author

• Anjali Pai, Brown University
  Presenting Author