Experimental Design
The participating colleges will package student loans for half of their students (as is done at half of community colleges and nearly all four-year colleges). Students who are offered a loan will be randomly assigned to two equal sized groups which will receive either a small loan offer or large loan. Within each of the two participating colleges, students who wish to borrow must comply with the same requirements, including completing entrance counseling and indicating an interest in borrowing via an online system. Our experiments will only change the way that loans are displayed to students, and these other procedures will not change. The random assignment to each of the treatment arms or control group will be stratified by student characteristics including other college(s) applied to, outstanding debt, student level (freshman, etc.), new versus returning status, dependency, unmet need, and expected family contribution. This stratification will ensure similarity between the control and treatment groups and will allow us to test whether the treatments have different impacts across different types of students. The experiment will involve all applicants receiving financial aid packages in the 2019-2020 school year at the two participating colleges.