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The success of policy interventions is frequently stymied by the inability to induce take-up in target populations. In this article, I show that local advertising in combination with small financial lotteries increases the likelihood that low-income students apply for and receive state aid. I isolate causal impacts by estimating the change in completed aid applications in high schools where the advertising program was canceled due to the expiration of private funding compared with high schools that never participated in the advertising program. Using this differences-in-differences framework, I find that state aid applications declined by approximately 3% to 4% (or roughly four to six applications per high school). Furthermore, postsecondary enrollment in 4-year public colleges declined by about one-half to one percentage point in impacted high schools. These results suggest that small incentives may be a cost-effective means of promoting program take-up for marginal students.

We examine changes in California's FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) applications during the COVID-19 crisis. There was little change in applications for high school graduates due to an early deadline for state aid. After the deadline—from early March to mid-August—FAFSA applications of potential college freshmen declined 14%, relative to prior years. Although there were initial declines in applications among more experienced undergraduates and graduate students, these quickly rebounded and were 8% higher relative to prior years. FAFSA applications increased more in counties that had larger increases in unemployment insurance claims but declined more in zip codes that were lower income or were more heavily Black and Hispanic.

This paper examines the Oregon Promise, a state-level program that exclusively subsidizes in-state community college attendance. I estimate impacts using a difference-in-difference design that links students in states with essentially universal 10th-grade PSAT coverage to national-level postsecondary enrollment data. I find that the implementation of the Oregon Promise increased enrollment at two-year colleges by roughly four to five percentage points for the first two eligible cohorts. In the first year of the program, the increase in community college enrollment comes primarily from students shifting out of four-year colleges, whereas in the second year the program predominately increases overall postsecondary enrollment.

We examine the long-term impacts of California’s state-based financial aid by tracking educational and labor force outcomes for up to 14 years after high school graduation. We identify program impacts by exploiting variation in eligibility rules using GPA and family income cutoffs that are ex ante unknown to applicants. Aid eligibility increases undergraduate and graduate degree completion, and for some subgroups, raises longer-run annual earnings and the likelihood that young adults reside in California. These findings suggest that the net cost of financial aid programs may frequently be overstated, though our results are too imprecise to provide exact cost-benefit estimates.

Only half of SAT-takers retake the exam, with even lower retake rates among low-income students and underrepresented minority (URM) students. We exploit discontinuous jumps in retake probabilities at multiples of 100, driven by left-digit bias, to estimate retaking’s causal effects. Retaking substantially improves SAT scores and increases four-year college enrollment rates, particularly for low-income and URM students. Eliminating disparities in retake rates could close up to 10 percent of the income-based gap and up to 7 percent of the race- based gap in four-year college enrollment rates of high school graduates.

In California, the combination of budget cuts and high unemployment from the Great Recession has resulted in \"overcrowded\" conditions, with more students attempting to enroll in fewer available classes. State-level policy recommendations have focused on altering registration priorities to mitigate the impact of overcrowding, but it is unclear whether these changes will impact enrollment, as little is known about student behavior within these systems. Present-biased individuals who must engage in immediate efforts to obtain delayed rewards may procrastinate before beginning a task and vary in how intensely they engage in a task once they begin, and registration is found to be no exception. Varying levels of delay and intensity were found to be predictive of students' course-taking patterns, even after controlling for a wide range of background characteristics, including previous registration delay and intensity. As a result, many courses that met graduation or transfer requirements had seat availability during the registration process and only closed near the beginning of the semester, which is in contrast to common narratives of overcrowding. Student registration is an understudied part of the college process, but suboptimal registration behaviors are shown to have significant consequences on the likelihood of college enrollment and retention.

Do signals of high aptitude shape the course of collegiate study? We apply a regression discontinuity design to understand how college major choice is impacted by receiving a higher Advanced Placement (AP) integer score, despite similar exam performance, compared to students who received a lower integer score. Attaining higher scores increases the probability that a student majors in that exam subject by approximately 5 percent (0.64 percentage points), with some individual exams demonstrating increases as high as 30 percent. A substantial portion of the overall effect is driven by behavioral responses to the positive signal of receiving a higher score.

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is the primary gatekeeper to secure financial aid for college. The federal government instituted two changes to the process in 2017, commonly known as “prior-prior year” FAFSA: (1) an earlier start date that lengthens the filing period and (2) the ability to use completed taxes from the prior calendar year. This paper uses descriptive statistics to examine resulting changes in application filing behavior in California. Students submitted their FAFSA substantially earlier and refiling rates increased among independent students in the policy year. Although these changes may have reduced the burden of applying, the earlier submissions did not appear to substantially alter state aid receipt or postsecondary attendance.

Hispanic high school graduates have lower college completion rates than academically similar white students. As Hispanic students have been theorized to be more constrained in the college search and selection process, one potential policy lever is to increase the set of colleges to which these students apply and attend. In this paper, we investigate the impacts of the College Board's National Hispanic Recognition Program (NHRP), which recognizes the highest-scoring 11th-grade Hispanic students on the PSAT/NMSQT, as a mechanism of improving college choice and completion. The program not only informs students about their relative ability, but it also enables colleges to identify, recruit, and offer enrollment incentives. Overall, we find that the program has strong effects on college attendance patterns, shifting students from two-year to four-year institutions, as well as to colleges that are out-of-state and public flagships, all areas where Hispanic attendance has lagged. NHRP shifts the geographic distribution of where students earn their degree, and increases overall bachelor's completion among Hispanic students who traditionally have had lower rates of success. These results demonstrate that college outreach can have significant impacts on the enrollment choices of Hispanic students and can serve as a policy lever for colleges looking to draw academically talented students.