I am a 2022-2023 recipient of a University of Michigan Library Student Mini Grant. I am using the grant to support my mixed-methods dissertation, which aims to learn how we can improve rural student college access and connect rural high schoolers with postsecondary opportunities that align with their goals. Through a randomized controlled trial (RCT), I am testing how an informational intervention—providing rural seniors with information about a statewide free tuition program—affects their college-going behavior. I will contextualize these results with findings from focus groups with rural high school seniors about their knowledge of the program and their perspectives on the programs’ affordances and limitations.
Nationwide, rural students enroll and graduate from college at lower rates than their non-rural peers (Wells et al., 2019). Furthermore, even though approximately 30% of K-12 public school students live in rural areas (NCES, 2017, Table 4), these students are severely underrepresented in education research (Thier & Beach, 2019). Results from my study will help inform strategies to enhance rural student college access and will add to the literature on rural student college access.
The Future Ready Iowa Last-Dollar Scholarship, the program that I evaluate, has the potential to increase college access for rural Iowans. The scholarship covers tuition for two-year college programs that prepare graduates to work in high-demand occupations in the local area. The Last-Dollar Scholarship aligns with several factors that evidence demonstrates are central to rural students’ postsecondary decision-making process: programs that align with a specific career and lead to stable earnings (Cox et al., 2014; Tieken, 2016), an opportunity to remain near their home communities (Ardoin, 2017; Carrico et al., 2019), and financial concerns that could disrupt enrollment (Goldman, 2019; Yang & Venezia, 2020).
I first conduct a RCT to test how providing students with information about the Last-Dollar Scholarship affects their college-going behavior. I randomly assigned the 279 public rural high schools in Iowa to one of three groups: (1) posters treatment, (2) posters + handouts treatment, or (3) control group. The first treatment arm, "posters" consists of informational posters about the Last-Dollar Scholarship that are displayed in rural schools throughout Iowa. The second treatment arm, "posters + handouts" consists of these same posters plus handouts distributed to seniors by their English teacher. These materials contain information about the scholarship and encourage interested seniors to file their FAFSA. Students can scan a QR code on the poster to go to the program website. I developed the campaign in close partnership with Iowa College Aid (ICA), the state organization that oversees financial aid. The materials emphasize factors that I expect to resonate with rural high schoolers and were designed to fit into the organization’s broader communication approach.
I will measure the effect of the intervention, launched in Fall 2022, on students’ college enrollment behavior by measuring whether seniors file their Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) by the end of the school year. Since students must complete the FAFSA to receive the Last-Dollar Scholarship, I expect that scholarship information may impact FAFSA filing as an intermediary outcome to college enrollment. I complement this causal RCT with a qualitative component that will contextualize my results and illuminate why the intervention did or did not work. I will conduct focus groups with rural high schoolers seniors to learn about their understanding of the Last-Dollar Scholarship and its role in their college decision-making process. My statewide informational campaign launched in fall 2022 and will be completed at the end of the 2022-2023 academic year. I am currently preparing to conduct the focus groups in late spring / early summer 2023. I will be spending the summer analyzing both sets of data, at which point I will determine whether the intervention had its intended effect on high schooler’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) filing.
My study will contribute to the academic and policy communities’ growing understanding of key factors related to rural student financial aid and overall college access. Many states, as well as some institutions, are adopting policies and initiatives aimed at increasing college accessibility for their rural populations (Brown, 2022; Weissman, 2022). The findings from my research will help inform higher education institutions and state education organizations about strategies on how to communicate postsecondary opportunities to these students in an accessible manner. For Iowa in particular, the intervention materials I created will be available for them to build upon and improve in future years.
Adopting a two-year college tuition-free policy leads to positive enrollment effects (e.g., Gándara & Li, 2020; Nguyen, 2020), with these effects driven in part by the programs’ clear promise of free tuition (e.g., Carruthers & Fox, 2016). Given these findings, better understanding how to get information about available scholarship into the hands of students likely to benefit from these opportunities – what I am studying in my RCT – will help states and institutions target their limited budgets and work towards meeting their statewide attainment goals. As tuition-free community college plans continue to gain political popularity at the state and national levels (Camera, 2019; Perna & Leigh, 2018), it is important to learn more about how to best market these programs. The results of my study will help inform Iowa College Aid and other state entities whether these particular marketing materials, and to an extent their broader reliance on printed material to communicate financial aid opportunities, have an effect on students’ enrollment behavior. Identifying the components of an effective communication strategy for rural students will help states target their limited budgets and, in so doing, make more progress toward statewide college attainment goals.
Hearing directly from rural students about their experiences navigating the college choice process, the role of money in these decisions, and their preferences for receiving information about financial aid opportunities – what I am studying in the qualitative portion of my study – will be an important contribution to the field as well. Much education policy work, particularly around financial aid, is dominated by experimental and quasi-experimental studies. Complementing this work with qualitative findings can help provide nuance and reveal patterns and explanations not always possible or apparent when using a purely quantitative research design.
I am grateful for the financial support I received from the University of Michigan Library Mini Grant. Using my funds, I was able to travel to Iowa, the state at the center of my research study, during Fall of 2022. During this trip I met with my research partners at Iowa College Aid. We also prepared the informational materials – which included creating the packets of materials and information that we sent out to schools. In total, we sent 561 posters to 187 counselors across 187 schools and 7,838 handouts to 193 English teachers across 95 schools. Thanks to the library grant, I also benefited from mentorship from one of the U-M librarians, who met with me to discuss strategies for finding literature from outside disciplines to help inform my study.
Kristen Cummings is a doctoral candidate at the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education in the School of Education. Her research interests include college access for rural students, state higher education policy, and financial aid. Prior to beginning her PhD program, Kristen worked as a research analyst at Abt Associates.