Education

Stacking the Deck for Employment Success: Labor Market Returns to Stackable Credentials

Authors: Katharine Meyer, Kelli A. Bird, Benjamin Castleman

With rapid technological transformations to the labor market along with COVID-19 related economic disruptions, many working adults return to college to obtain additional training or credentials. Using a comparative individual fixed effects strategy and an administrative panel dataset of enrollment and employment in Virginia, we provide the first causal estimates of credential “stacking” among working adults. 

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Education

Pushing College Advising Forward: Experimental Evidence on Intensive Advising and College Success

Authors: Benjamin Castleman, Denise Deutschlander, Gabrielle Lohner

Growing experimental evidence demonstrates that low-touch informational, nudge, and virtual advising interventions are ineffective at improving postsecondary educational outcomes for economically-disadvantaged students at scale. Intensive in-person college advising programs are a considerably higher-touch and more resource intensive strategy; some programs provide students with dozen of hours of individualized assistance starting in high school and continuing through college, and can cost thousands of dollars per student served.

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Education

Nudges Don’t Work When the Benefits Are Ambiguous: Evidence from a High-Stakes Education Program

Authors: Benjamin Castleman, Francis X. Murphy, Richard W. Patterson, William L. Skimmyhorn

The Post-9/11 GI Bill allows service members to transfer generous education benefits to a dependent. We run a large scale experiment that encourages service members to consider the transfer option among a population that includes individuals for whom the transfer benefits are clear and individuals for whom the net-benefits are significantly more ambiguous. We find no impact of a one-time email about benefits transfer among service members for whom we predict considerable ambiguity in the action, but sizeable impacts among service members for whom education benefits transfer is far less ambiguous.

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Education

Negative Impacts From the Shift to Online Learning During the COVID-19 Crisis: Evidence from a Statewide Community College System

Authors: Kelli A. Bird, Benjamin Castleman, Gabrielle Lohner

The COVID-19 pandemic led to an abrupt shift from in-person to virtual instruction in Spring 2020. Using a difference-in-differences framework that leverages within-course variation on whether students started their Spring 2020 courses in person or online, we estimate the impact of this shift on the academic performance of Virginia’s community college students. We find that the shift to virtual instruction resulted in a 6.7 percentage point decrease in course completion, driven by increases in both course withdrawal and failure. Faculty experience teaching a course online did not mitigate the negative effects of moving to virtual instruction.

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Education

Who Should Re-enroll in College? The Academic and Labor Market Profile of Adults with Substantial College Credits But No Degree

Authors: Kelli A. Bird, Benjamin Castleman, Brett Fischer, Benjamin T. Skinner

Tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs in the wake of the COVID-19 health and economic crisis, and a sizable share of these job losses may be permanent. Unemployment rates are particularly high among adults without a college degree. Recent state policy efforts h

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Education

Experimental Evidence on Early Intervention: The Impact of Full-day Kindergarten

Authors: Chloe R. Gibbs

Nearly all school-age children in the United States attend kindergarten, and approximately three-quarters of kindergarten students are in full-day classrooms. While there have been dramatic increases in provision of and participation in full-day kindergarten, there is little evidence on the impact and cost-effectiveness of such programs and policies, particularly as compared to other types of investments in early childhood.

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Education

College Advising at a National Scale: Experimental Evidence from the CollegePoint initiative

Authors: Zach Sullivan, Benjamin Castleman, Eric Bettinger

In recognition of the complexity of the college and financial aid application process, and in response to insufficient access to family or school-based counseling among economically-disadvantaged populations, investments at the local, state, and federal level have expanded students’ access to college and financial aid advising. Experimental and quasi-experimental studies of these programs demonstrate that they can generate substantial improvements in the rate at which low-income students enroll and persist in college.

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