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ERIC Number: ED663349
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2024-Sep-20
Pages: N/A
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
How Changes to the Salience of Job Characteristics Affect College Students' Decisions
Carly Robinson; Katharine Meyer; Chastity Bailey-Fakhoury; Susanna Loeb; Amirpasha Zandieh
Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness
Background/Purpose: Students enroll in college at least in part to prepare for a career after graduation. At the same time, for many students, attending college requires working to earn money (Perna, 2020). Optimally, these work positions concurrently provide students the opportunity to develop skills that have labor market returns, explore career interests, contribute to their communities, and learn how to become positive members of society. Even if these jobs exist, the exposure of these enriching job opportunities is not enough--the job-related benefits that align with their goals must be salient (Bordalo, Gennaioli, and Shleifer 2012, 2022). The salience of specific information affects behaviors--including whether a person applies for a job or not--because attention-grabbing stimuli is overweighted compared to other information (Taylor and Thompson 1982). College students ideally choose work opportunities that optimize their financial needs, as well as their career and personal interests. For jobs that satisfy several goals for college students, like tutoring, certain benefits will likely be more salient than others. In the absence of salient information about how jobs align with each of their goals, students may rely on misleading heuristics (such as "interesting jobs pay badly") and choose sub-optimal options (Baron 2014; Gigerenzer and Gaissmaier 2011). Intervention and Research Design: In this field experiment, we test the effect of making different benefits of a job salient and explore the impact on application behaviors. In partnership with a large, public university, we randomly assigned students to receive either a generic tutor recruitment email, or one of four treatment emails making a different benefit of tutoring salient. Among those assigned to the treatment, students randomly received emails about the monetary benefit of tutoring (emphasizing the hourly wage), the prosocial benefits of tutoring (emphasizing how the K-12 students would benefit), the social benefits of tutoring (emphasizing the chance to meet other peers), or the career benefits of tutoring (emphasizing skills gained from tutoring). Table 1 provides additional information. The intervention included an initial email in June 2022 and a follow-up email a week later recruiting students to apply to be tutors starting in the fall 2022 semester. Setting and Participants: We implemented the intervention at Grand Valley State University (GVSU), a public university in Michigan. In 2020, GVSU developed a tutoring service called "K-12 Connect" to connect college tutors with Michigan K-12 students. All 15,860 undergraduate students enrolled at GVSU as of June of 2022 were included in the experimental sample. Table 2 provides descriptive information about the sample. Data: Our main outcomes of interest were (1) whether students opened the email, (2) whether students clicked through to the application, (3) whether students applied to become a tutor, (4) whether students were hired as tutors. We later were able to examine (5) whether students were employed as tutors six months after the intervention as a measure of long-term impact. Analysis: Our field experiment was preregistered (REES#13360). We conducted a student-level randomization, stratified by their year in school (first year, sophomore, etc.) and whether they were enrolled in the summer 2022 term or not, resulting in eight strata. To assess the impact of assignment to the treatment on the outcomes, we use regression models, controlling for student characteristics at baseline and randomization strata (see Appendix). Results: Table 3 shows a large and statistically significant treatment effects of the monetary framing on nearly all outcomes. Students assigned the monetary condition were 1.7 percentage points more likely to complete an application, 1.1 percentage points more likely to be hired as tutors, and 0.6 percentage points more likely to be working as tutors six months later. In our exploratory heterogeneity analyses, the monetary messaging demonstrated a consistent and statistically significant effect on nearly all subgroups (see Table 4). Emphasizing the monetary benefits was far and away the most successful strategy for driving students to apply. Building on this insight, we ran a follow-up study to conceptually replicate our finding and test the impact of making the monetary benefits salient alongside another benefit (that is, whether sending an email about the monetary benefits and another type of benefit resulted in differential recruitment than the monetary benefits messaging alone). We found broadly consistent results--across monetary message types, application rates were similar, though largest for messages emphasizing both the monetary and prosocial benefits. See Table 5. GVSU asked students on their application why they wanted to become a tutor. They could select from seven options, which aligned with the motivational messages: prosocial, monetary, career, and social. We present student responses from the primary study and the follow-up in Figure 2. Despite the strong treatment effect of the monetary motivation in the primary experimental study in June 2022, only 2% said they applied to be a tutor because tutoring paid well. These survey insights highlight the importance of qualitative work alongside experimental tests. The experimental results show intrinsic motivations are not sufficient, and that highlighting the monetary benefit is a crucial component to prospective outreach. Conclusion: We studied recruitment using two randomized controlled trials and found large effects of emphasizing the monetary benefits of tutoring on the likelihood students applied for and subsequently were hired for tutoring positions. We found no evidence that emphasizing the prosocial (for example, helping the community), social (for example, meeting other students), or career (for example, building professional skills) increased applications beyond generic outreach. The monetary framing increased application rates by 196 percent relative to the control group, which resulted in students receiving monetary benefits messaging being 205 percent more likely to be hired as tutors. Notably, students recruited through the monetary messaging were equally likely to still be employed as tutors six months after the intervention as those assigned to other conditions, suggesting that the extrinsic motivator of money did not result in suboptimal hiring. This research demonstrates that the salience of information can substantially alter behavior and that recruitment strategies increasing the salience of overlooked characteristics can meaningfully increase applications and the pool of workers hired.
Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness. 2040 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208. Tel: 202-495-0920; e-mail: contact@sree.org; Web site: https://www.sree.org/
Publication Type: Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE)
Identifiers - Location: Michigan
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A