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 2019. The workshop, targeted at guidance counselors, provided information on the advantages to majoring in economics. Counselors at other randomly selected high schools were initially planned to receive standard information materials via mail, and a third set of schools acted as a control group.

We modified the design in early 2020 (when COVID-19 hit). Instead of sending information materials to the second group of schools, we decided to invite the second group of schools to participate in an online counselor workshop held via zoom in Fall 2020. In Summer 2022, we decided to conduct a second round of treatment for the schools originally assigned to the in-person counselor workshop. We invited the schools who were originally invited but did not participate in the 2019 workshop to participate in a Fall 2022 workshop, scheduled for October 21, 2022.

2019-09-06

2022-10-21

The primary short-term outcome is the decision to major in economics.
We look at this decision when students apply to college, when they enroll and when they graduate.

The interest in the economics major is first stated in the application to Texas A&M University. We analyze application and admission data. We then look at course and majoring data for the students who decided to enroll at Texas A&M.
We conduct heterogeneity analysis by ability, as measured by students' Math SAT scores.

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.

*2022 Update: Changes in the Design*
In late Summer 2019, we decided to increase the number of Workshop schools to 120 by randomly selecting 60 schools previously assigned to the Control group. This was in response to a lower than expected (planned) participation rate from the schools invited to the Workshop. In Spring 2020, we decided not to implement the "information only" treatment and instead invite the T2 schools to participate in an online workshop held via zoom in Fall 2020. In Summer 2022, we decided to conduct a new Counselor Workshop with the T1 schools that were invited but did not participate in the 2019 Counselor Workshop. The 2022 workshop is scheduled for October 21, 2022.

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).

The randomization was later modified to increase the number of Workshop schools. Half of the schools originally in the Control group were randomly selected to be part of the Workshop treatment group.

Yes

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 will 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 sampled schools in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. We may be able to also get data from earlier graduation years.

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

*Modified Design
Control: 57 schools
T1: 120 schools
T2: 57 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.