Table 3.
Relative Effectiveness of Interventions Targeting College Enrollment
| Article | Intervention type | Treatment | Impact | Cost | Relative effectiveness |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bettinger, Long, Oreopoulos, & Sanbonmatsu (2012) | Nudge | Tax professionals offered to help low-income families fill out financial-aid forms and calculate potential aid amounts at the time of tax preparation. | Increase of 8.1 (3.5) percentage points in likelihood of attending college the next year | $53.02 per participant for training of and payment for tax professionals, materials, software, and call-center support | 1.53 (0.66) additional students enrolled in college within the next year per $1,000 spent |
| Dynarski (2003) | Traditional (financial incentive) | The Social Security Student Benefit Program gave out monthly stipends to young adults enrolled in college who had a parent eligible for benefits as a federal postsecondary-education subsidy until the 1980s. | Change of 18.2 (9.6) percentage points in likelihood of attending college | $5,181 per eligible person for stipends | 0.0351 (0.0185) additional students enrolled in college per $1,000 spent |
| Long (2004a) | Traditional (financial incentive) | Some states offered state education subsidies for students attending their in-state public universities. | 2.3% increase in number of students attending college (from 5,535 to 5,664 students)a,b | $4,468 per college student ($25.3 million total) for subsidiesb | 0.0051 additional students enrolled in college per $1,000 spenta |
|
Long
(2004b); Bulman & Hoxby (2015) |
Traditional (financial incentive) | The federal government offered the Hope Scholarship, Lifetime Learning, and American Opportunity Tax Credits to subsidize spending on higher education. | Negligible effect | Negligible effect |
Note: Standard errors are reported in parentheses. Standard errors for the relative-effectiveness measure were calculated by scaling the standard errors for the overall impact by the cost of the intervention, ignoring any uncertainty regarding the cost of the intervention.
a
For this estimate, standard errors could not be calculated using the information reported. bIt was not possible to calculate a figure for this estimate that was strictly comparable with the other figures in the same column.