The trouble with texting: success in college requires more than completing forms.
Greene, Jay P.
The 160-Character Solution: How Text Messaging and Other Behavioral
Strategies Can Improve Education
by Benjamin L. Castleman
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015, $22.95; 160 pages.
Behavioral economic solutions to public policy problems are all the
rage, not just among academics but also among the intellectual jet set
of policy wonks and foundation officials. Books like Predictably
Irrational by Dan Ariely and Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
have become best sellers, offering popularized descriptions of results
from research on decisionmaking. Now we can add University of Virginia
assistant professor Benjamin Castleman's new book, The
160-Character Solution, to that list.
All of these books, including Castleman's, offer some useful
insights from scholarly work about ways in which people can be
systematically irrational in their decisions. Faced with too much
information and too many options, some people can become paralyzed and
fail to make any active decisions. Others navigate this complexity by
adopting simplifying strategies that may steer them toward
"bad" decisions. Faced with difficult and high-stress
decisions, people sometimes pursue their short-term interests at the
expense of longer-term benefits. And people sometimes lack sufficient
information or motivation to make appropriate decisions.
All of these observations about the limits of rational
decision-making are well supported, insofar as they go, but where
Castleman and others run into trouble is when they try to design
solutions. The paradox in trying to fix the irrationality of others is
the implicit assumption that the people designing the solutions are
themselves largely free of systematic irrationality. Unfortunately, even
very smart and well-meaning scholars usually lack the perfect foresight
and complete information to design effective solutions for others.
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Let's consider the 160-character solution, which is the title
of Castleman's book and the topic of his most well-known study.
Castleman and others observed that a large percentage of low-income
students who manage to apply and get accepted to college during their
senior year of high school nevertheless fail to show up and enroll in
college in the fall. Researchers attribute this "summer melt"
to students being intimidated by the FAFSA, the college financial-aid
form. If students find completing that form to be too complicated or
psychologically daunting, then they don't receive an offer of
financial assistance and cannot enroll in school.
Castleman and his University of Pittsburgh colleague Lindsay Page
devised a potentially clever solution to the problem of summer melt.
They would send short text messages to students reminding them to
complete the FAFSA and directing them to sources of help if they needed
it. To assess the effectiveness of this intervention, Castleman and Page
determined by lottery which eligible students would receive these texts
and which would not. They found that students who received the texts
reminding them to complete the FAFSA were significantly more likely to
follow through on their acceptance, complete the FAFSA, and enroll in
college.
At first blush this would seem like a remarkably cost-effective
policy intervention. If sending a few cheap and easy text messages could
substantially reduce the summer melt problem among low-income students,
we should make this and other light-touch interventions widespread
practice. But closer examination suggests that FAFSA reminder text
messages may not be so effective and may even expose students to
significant harm.
Other researchers have had difficulty replicating Castleman and
Page's results. For example, UCLA researchers Sarah Reber and
Meredith Phillips evaluated a similar policy intervention "to
address informational and social support barriers to college
enrollment" that "was delivered 'virtually' via the
internet, phone, email, text message, and social networking
platforms." Despite a large sample of several thousand students in
California, Reber and Phillips "do not find evidence of effects of
the program on college enrollment outcomes." Peter Bergman at
Teachers College, Jeff Denning at Brigham Young University, and Dayanand
Manoli at the University of Texas at Austin are conducting the
evaluation of another FAFSA reminder intervention with a very large
sample in Texas and are reportedly also failing to find effects.
Castleman and Page's positive results may have just been a fluke or
may have been effective only in particular circumstances.
In addition, even if sending text messages is successful at getting
more low-income students to complete the FAFSA and enroll in college in
the fall, it is unclear whether this ensures a positive outcome.
Students who start college but then fail to finish may be hurt by
forsaking employment and other training opportunities and taking on
significant debt for a credential they never earn. The students who are
accepted to college but then decide not to enroll may have just been
deterred by an intimidating form, as Castleman suspects, or they may
know things about themselves that made them rationally decide not to
pursue a degree they are unlikely to complete. The 160-character
solution may unwittingly push students into making decisions that are
against their better judgment and end up harming them. Castleman has not
reported retention and graduation rates from the texting intervention,
so we do not know whether this behavioral nudge is helping or hurting
students in the long term.
Castleman insists that the nudge policies he is advocating are
designed only to help people realize their own goals, not impose
preferences on them: "I don't recommend interventions that
assume to tell people what is in their own best interest." But it
is obvious that this cannot be true. In a variety of subtle and
not-so-subtle ways, the kinds of behavioral decisionmaking interventions
Castleman advocates influence and shape what people prefer. The text
message reminder to complete the FAFSA suggests that students should
enroll in college even if the students themselves think maybe they
shouldn't. Interventions that induce people to save more toward
college presuppose that saving is a better use of funds than spending
the money on immediate needs, including educational ones. Policy
analysts may be right that more low-income students accepted to college
should follow through and enroll and that people should save more for
college, but let's not pretend that these interventions do not
impose our preferences onto others. There is a reason why these are
called "nudges" instead of "leaving people alones."
In some instances, we might see this kind of imposition as
reasonable. People facing a choice might as well be provided with
information and encouraged not to default into inaction. For example,
enticing people to get their flu shots or other vaccines that have
long-term benefits relative to their short-term costs and minimal risks
seems perfectly sensible.
But most educational decisions are more complicated and require a
long string of decisions and actions before success is produced. For
these reasons, educational prods are much more likely to be intrusive
and much less likely to be effective. Success in college involves much
more than just completing the FAFSA and following through on enrollment.
Even if students jump the FAFSA hurdle, they then have to register for
courses, complete assignments, fill out more intimidating forms, and so
forth. Success in college and later life involves a never-ending series
of hurdles to jump. Getting students over the first one if they lack the
motivation or ability to jump subsequent ones can set them up for an
expensive failure. Behavioral nudges are much more likely to be
effective for things like vaccines, which only require one action for
success, and less likely to have meaningful benefits in most other areas
of life, including education, that are not "one and done" type
activities.
Success in education and most other realms of life requires
perseverance and conscientiousness. The 160-character solution could
more aptly be named "the no-character solution," because it
does nothing to address the real deficits that many students have. Just
getting students past the FAFSA challenge, if texting is actually
effective in doing that, does not improve the skills students need to
get past all of the rest. And if FAFSA is just a particularly pivotal
and difficult hurdle, it might make more sense for us to simplify the
FAFSA requirement than to nudge people over it.
Public bureaucracies have a tendency to create overly complicated
and opaque procedures. Our energy would likely be better spent
streamlining those procedures than creating behavioral nudges to guide
people through the maze we've built for them. And to the extent
that some paperwork and bureaucratic hassle is inevitable, we should be
wary of pushing people through those hassles. It's unclear whether
our pushing will really help: we may be pushing them in a way they
don't want, and we may set them up for failure to get through
subsequent hassles. Perhaps the most useful insight from
Castleman's book is that it's a lot easier to understand the
limitations of rational decision-making than to devise solutions.
As reviewed by Jay P. Greene
Jay P. Greene is distinguished professor of education reform at the
University of Arkansas.