Sludge (Administrative Burden)

College Admissions

In the United States, the process of applying to colleges and universities is complicated, and that is especially so for students who qualify for financial aid. Sludge can be found at every step. That is unfortunate because students from lower-income families are severely underrepresented. The authors report that more students from the top 1 percent of the income distribution attended top universities in the United States than from the bottom 50 percent. You might think this fact has a simple explanation, namely that the top schools are very expensive. But in fact, many of the best universities are eager to pay all the costs of attending the school to qualified low-income students. Furthermore, attending a top school can create many attractive career opportunities. So why don’t more students from poor families apply? Sludge is an important factor, and getting rid of it can help a lot.

The potential power of aggressive sludge removal has been demonstrated in a large-scale field experiment conducted by the economist Susan Dynarski and her colleagues.9 Their goal was to encourage high-achieving Michigan high school students from low-income families to apply to the University of Michigan (the flagship university in the state). To do so they approached four thousand such students at the beginning of their last year of high school. Half of them received a packet in the first week of September guaranteeing them financial aid at the university as long as they applied and were admitted. They did not have to complete the onerous financial aid forms. Instead the financial aid was offered on the basis of their eligibility for subsidized meals at their high school, which was observable to the researchers. The other students just received an information package from the university encouraging them to apply.

By offering the experimental group the financial aid up front, the researchers managed to flip the traditional college application timeline: a student typically receives financial aid grants from schools after she is already admitted, not before she even applies. So, not only could the students skip filling out the forms, the amount of uncertainty they faced was significantly reduced. The results were striking. Only 26 percent of the students who received no tuition guarantee applied to University of Michigan, while 68 percent of students with the guarantee applied. Enrollment more than doubled, and this cannot be attributed to any change in financial incentives. Students who did not receive the special treatment but nevertheless applied received the same financial aid. They just had to overcome more sludge to get that aid.

Schools can also attract more students by de-sludging other aspects of the admissions process, in addition to financial aid. For example, the book describes a University of Texas at Austin automatic-admission policy for students in the top 6 percent of their high school class.10 The book also describes West Sacramento, California, which partnered with Sacramento City College to ensure that each of its high school seniors received admission to that local, two-year college upon graduation.11 By eliminating the forms, Sacramento’s plan strives to make higher education the default option for graduating seniors who would otherwise just not go to the trouble.