Professor Marita Jacob (University of Cologne),
Friday February 27th, 15:00-16:00
Location: To be announced
Abstract: Promoting University Access and Persistence:
Long-term Experimental Evidence on Reducing Social Inequalities
Higher education (HE) remains socially
selective in many countries, yet evidence on the effectiveness of interventions
in European contexts is scarce, particularly regarding high-intensity programs.
This talk presents findings from a randomized controlled trial evaluating an
intensive, individualized guidance counseling program in North Rhine-Westphalia
(Germany), with follow-up data collected up to 4.5 years after students’
Abitur.
Drawing on a panel survey of over 1,000
upper secondary school students, we address three research questions. First, we
ask whether counseling affects HE enrollment differently for students from low
and high social origins. Results show that counseling increased enrollment
among students from low social backgrounds while, at the same time, reducing it
among students from high social backgrounds — in part by directing academically
less suited students toward vocational training. Second, we investigate whether
counseling has a lasting positive impact on students from low social origins by
promoting persistence in HE. We find positive effects on persistence, with
somewhat weaker effects for timely degree completion. Third, we move beyond
individual-level treatment effects to address a question often neglected in the
intervention literature: how does a program affect social inequality at the
aggregate level? Using an upscaling framework, we show that the program’s
potential to close the social gap in HE depends critically on the extent of
implementation and on whether it is offered universally or targeted to specific
groups. We present a visualization tool that illustrates how both the program’s
effect size and the share of students that participate jointly determine
whether and to what extent social inequality is actually reduced.
These findings have implications for the
design and scaling of educational interventions and highlight the importance of
distinguishing micro-level treatment effects from macro-level inequality
outcomes.