Recruiting Economics Majors: The Impact of an Information Campaign Targeted at High School Counselors

We randomly select high schools in Texas to receive an invitation to participate in a workshop at Texas A&M in early September. The workshop, targeted at guidance counselors, will provide information on the advantages to majoring in economics. Counselors at other randomly selected high schools will receive standard information materials via mail, and a third set of schools will act as a control group.

2019-09-06

2019-11-29

The primary short-term outcome is the decision to major in economics.

Secondary longer-term variables of interest are individual labor market outcomes.

We are working with a sample of 234 high schools in Texas who have been sending the largest number of students to Texas A&M University in the past 5 years. Of them, we have randomly selected 60 schools to be part of a "Workshop" treatment group (T1). These schools will receive an invitation by email to send a high school counselor to participate in a workshop at Texas A&M on September 6, 2019. The workshop aims to inform guidance and college counselors of the advantages to majoring in Economics.

We have randomly selected an additional 57 schools to be part of our "Information only" treatment group (T2). The remaining 117 schools will be in the control group. The "information only group" will receive materials (e.g. flyers and leaflets) displaying the same information. The control group will not be contacted in any ways.

We aim to track students enrolled at Texas A&M the following academic years (2020-2021, 2021-2022, 2022-2023) and coming from treatment and control schools, to test whether the interventions had an impact on the take-up of the economics major. We also plan to use restricted-use administrative data (e.g., data from the University of Texas at Dallas Education Research Center) to identify the impact of the treatments on take-up at other universities and, ultimately, on labor market outcomes.

Not available

Randomization done in office by a computer.

We randomized schools into three groups: Control, Workshop treatment group (T1) and Information treatment group (T2).

No

234 schools

While the randomization is done at the school level, we are interested in the impact of the intervention on student-level outcomes. We will first investigate the majoring decisions of Texas A&M students coming from the 234 sampled schools. Since each school sends on average 22 students to Texas A&M per year, we will be working with approximately 5200 students per year. Our student sample will be substantially larger when we'll obtain data from the University of Texas at Dallas Education Research Center, which will allow us to examine majoring decisions and labor market outcomes for all students who graduated from the samples schools in 2020, 2021 and 2022.

Control: 117 schools
T1: 60 schools
T2: 56 schools

The main (short-term) outcome is the decision to major in economics at Texas A&M. Given the baseline percentage of students coming to Texas A&M from the sampled schools and majoring in economics, we are powered to detect a minimum effect of 2 percentage points.