By Bill DeBaun, Senior Director of Data and Strategic Initiatives
Reading time: Four minutes
It can be hard to keep up with all the latest reports. Acknowledging that, here are summaries of three recent interesting pieces of research.
CUNY Peer Counseling Program Increases College Enrollment for High School Seniors:
The City University of New York (CUNY) is already well-known in college access research circles because of the remarkable (and replicable) success of its Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) program, but now they’re reporting on another
success. The College and Career Bridge for All program, which is notably devoid of a clever acronym, is a partnership between CUNY and the New York City Public Schools. The program “uses peer counselors and real-time admission data to help high school
seniors navigate the college admission and enrollment process.”
More from the press release on the model: “The ‘near-peer’ program uses college student mentors, called bridge coaches, to connect with high school seniors by text, email, social media or virtual meetings. In order to foster a strong connection, the college-age
mentors and high school seniors are matched on the basis of shared experience, such as borough of residence, home language or high school. Students who don’t start at college in the fall can continue in the winter bridge program, which supports spring
enrollment.”
The results were quite good. High school seniors who connected with a peer mentor “were seven percentage points more likely to enroll in college compared to those who did not,” and among more than 53,000 students in the program in 2020, the most significant
gains were among Black (+eight percentage points) and Latino/a (+nine) students who lived in low-income neighborhoods.
Read more in the full study from CUNY’s Office of Applied Research, Evaluation,
& Data Analytics.
Universal Pre-K Shows 12% Jump in College Enrollment Likelihood: It’s really hard to make a connection
between early childhood interventions and postsecondary outcomes. As The Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay writes in the linked article, “the research on early childhood education can seem as messy as a playground sandbox.” However, the
latest update from a research line out of Tulsa, OK that examines 4,000 students who attended a universal pre-K program has promising results on college enrollment.
“In 1998, Oklahoma became the first state to offer free public prekindergarten for all four-year-old's,” Barshay explains. About 40% of 4,000 four-year-old's eligible for the pre-K program in 2005-06 attended it; another 10% went to Head Start, and 50%
declined both options (although many of this group went to private daycares or preschools).
Jump forward to the current study, and researchers looked at these students’ college enrollment records via the National Student Clearinghouse. They found that 44% of students participating in the pre-K program enrolled in college between 2019 and 2021
compared to 37% of Head Start alumni and 33% of students who enrolled in neither. The researchers then “attempted to overcome this problem by making statistical adjustments to compare children with the same income and family characteristics, such
as the mother’s level of education.” After making these adjustments, they found “the likelihood of enrolling in college was 12 percentage points higher if a child attended a Tulsa public school preschool than if a child didn’t attend.”
Compelling results that connect our work in college access and attainment, which is well into the educational pipeline, with an intervention at the very start of it.
Getting Families to Actually Visit Your Materials Is Tough. As a field, we produce all kinds of resources and toolkits for students and families to use, but it’s often difficult to drive users to said materials. The Arkansas Department
of Education partnered with the Regional Education Laboratory (REL)-Southwest to examine the effectiveness of driving families to a K-6 reading intervention. The study randomly assigned families to one of eight conditions “which varied the mode of communication (email only or email and text message), the presentation of information (no graphic or with a graphic), and the type of sender (generic sender or known sender).”
Unsurprisingly, the click rate “was highest for households assigned to receive both emails and text messages, with a graphic, and from a known sender.” Perhaps more surprisingly is that adding text messages added more than four times the increase to click
rates (+6.5 percentage points) than sending communications from a known sender (+1.5 percentage points). Adding a graphic had a basically null effect (+0.1 percentage points).
This has implications for National College Attainment Network (NCAN) members’ work, if text messages aren’t a key part of your communications strategy, they need to be, and now we have the research that supports it.
Email to a Friend