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The Best Way To Combat 'Summer Melt' Is With A 'Nudge'

This article is more than 4 years old.

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High school graduation season is filled with pomp and circumstance, loud cheers, and anticipation of college life, but some students feted with congratulatory wishes in June are college campus no-shows by August. For example, 10% of KIPP students do not make it to their first day of college due to “summer melt,” a scenario where a number of obstacles can deter students from enrolling in college, such as financial challenges, family crises and fear of the unknown.

A study by researchers Benjamin Castleman and Lindsay Page estimates that 10 to 20%  of students nationally do not enroll in college due to summer melt. For students from low-income households, melt can reach as high as 40%.

Starting this month, the KIPP Foundation, with support from the Ludwig Family Foundation and UBS, is launching KIPP’s National Nudge Texting Pilot in eight regions throughout the United States to combat this national problem. This pilot is distinct from many other nudge programs as it marks one of the first times a major national network of students attending many universities is using artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

Specifically, during this 18-month pilot, KIPP will schedule and send nudge text messages directly to participating alumni from pilot regions. The pilot’s target population is KIPP’s newly minted Class of 2019 and college-enrolled KIPP alumni from Class of 2018.

Through AdmitHub, the program utilizes natural language processing to recognize a greater variety of student responses beyond simple “yes” and “no” answers as well as AI to communicate with students and answer common questions.

The nudge-text technology applies behavioral insights with data from our alumni database to prompt students via text messages with personalized and actionable information key for them to stay on task leading up to college enrollment.

A recent study that included nearly 5,000 students from low-income households shows that 72%of students who received the nudge intervention at a cost of $7 per student successfully enrolled in college, compared with 66% of students who enrolled in college but did not receive the nudge intervention . In addition to reducing summer melt, we hope to see an increase in FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) and promote help-seeking behaviors and campus connectivity.

Programs like the National Nudge Texting Pilot can increase college-going and college-completion rates nationwide. To that point, in a recently released report, KIPP recommends that the U.S. Congress create a tiered evidence-based grant to support more programs like this from the institution level as part of the re-authorization of the Higher Education Act. This kind of national direct-to-student communications will further prioritize support for college-bound students.

This first phase of KIPP’s National Nudge Texting Pilot will run through June 2020; if proven successful, we expect to expand the pilot to include additional regions and potentially a broader student target population. The KIPP Foundation will own and have access to all data collected from students, enabling us and our regions the ability to track important metrics, including response rates.

Success with this pilot will help more KIPPsters successfully enroll in their intended college in the fall and graduate on time. In the process, KIPP persistence advisors will spend less time on data collection and entry and more time coaching students.

We understand this pilot is just one way we can proactively support our students after they leave KIPP and enter postsecondary education. Its success will not only prepare our students for entry into college, it also will provide them with the support they need to get through their higher education journey and up to securing their first job. Sometimes such lofty goals begin with a “nudge.”