Aizat Nurshatayeva

Award displacement occurs when one type of financial aid award directly contributes to the change in the quantity of another award. We explore whether postsecondary institutions displaced awards in response to the Pittsburgh Promise scholarship by capitalizing on the doubling of the maximum Promise amount in 2012. We use de-identified student-level data on each Promise recipient’s actual cost of attendance, grants, and scholarships, as well as demographic and academic characteristics from school district administrative files to examine whether and how components of students’ financial aid packages and total costs of attendance changed after the Promise award increase. To account for overall trends in pricing and financial aid, we compare Promise recipients to the average first-time, full-time freshman entering the same institutions in the same year as reported by the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). With these two data sources, we assess differences in costs and awards between Promise students and their peers, on average, and examine whether and in what ways these differences changed after the increase in Promise funding. We refer to this strategy as a “quasi-difference-in-differences” design. We do not find evidence that institutions are responding to the Promise increase through aid reductions.

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We examine through a field experiment whether outreach and support provided through an AI-enabled chatbot can reduce summer melt and improve first-year college enrollment at a four-year university and at a community college. At the four-year college, the chatbot increased overall success with navigating financial aid processes, such that student take up of educational loans increased by four percentage points. This financial aid effect was concentrated among would-be first-generation college goers, for whom loan acceptances increased by eight percentage points. In addition, the outreach increased first-generation students’ success with course registration and fall semester enrollment each by three percentage points. For the community college, where the randomized experiment could not be robustly implemented due to limited cell phone number information, we present a qualitative analysis of organizational readiness for chatbot implementation. Together, our findings suggest that proactive outreach to students is likely to be most successful when targeted to those who may be struggling (for example, in keeping up with required administrative tasks). Yet, such targeting requires university systems to have ready access to and ability to make use of their administrative data.

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English-only college education in non-English speaking countries is a rapidly growing phenomenon that has been dubbed as the most important trend in higher education internationalization. Despite worldwide popularity, there is little empirical evidence about how the transition to English-only instruction affects students’ academic outcomes. Using a natural experiment at a selective university in Central Asia and a difference-in-differences strategy, we estimate the causal effect of switching to English-only instruction on students’ college outcomes. We find that the introduction of English-only instruction led to a decrease of GPAs and probability of graduation and an increase in the number of failed course credits. Although negative, the effects were short-lived. The difference-in-differences estimates and the examination of potential mechanisms suggest that at least in selective universities in non-English speaking countries, the switch to English-only instruction may affect college outcomes negatively at the time of transition but may not necessarily imply longer-run negative effects.

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