Scaling Up Efforts to Reach High-Achieving, Low-Income Students

By Beckie Supiano. An experiment conducted by two economists, Caroline M. Hoxby and Sarah Turner, has found that customized college information can change the enrollment patterns of high-achieving, low-income students—students who would be admissible at the most selective colleges but who tend not to apply to them. One key takeaway from that work is that “low-income students do aspire to go to the best college that will admit them and that they’re able to afford,” Ms. Hoxby said at an event here on Wednesday put on by the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project. Such students’ enrollment choices, in other words, are the result not of their preferences but of an information gap. Read more...