AERA Open - An Evaluation of the Educational Impact of College Campus Visits - A Randomized Experiment

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Adam

A Randomized Experiment studies whether eighth-grade visits to a college campus affect students’ interest in and preparation for college. Within schools, two cohorts were assigned to a control group receiving an information packet or a treatment group receiving the same information plus three visits to a flagship university. Outcomes include college knowledge, postsecondary intentions, preparatory behaviors, academic engagement, and ninth-grade course enrollment. Treated students show higher college knowledge, efficacy, grit, and greater likelihood of discussing college with school staff, plus increased enrollment in advanced science and social science courses.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages18

Reading Time45 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Barriers to college access and success

Campus belonging and early outreach

Study Design

Multisite randomized field experiment

Treatment and control conditions

Outcomes and Findings

Knowledge, intentions, engagement

Academic course enrollment

Mixed and negative effects

AERA Open January-December 2021, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 1–18 DOI: 10. 1177/2332858421989707 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)© The Author(s) 2021. [http://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero](http://journals.sagepub.com/home/ero) An Evaluation of the Educational Impact of College Campus Visits: A Randomized Experiment Elise Swanson University of Southern California Katherine Kopotic Saint Louis University Gema Zamarro Jonathan N. Mills Jay P. Greene University of Arkansas Gary W. Ritter Saint Louis University We study whether visits to a college campus during eighth grade affect students’interest in and preparation for college. Two cohorts of eighth graders were randomized within schools to a control condition, in which they received a college informational packet, or a treatment condition, in which they received the same information and visited a flagship university three times during an academic year. We estimate the effect of the visits on students’college knowledge, postsecondary intentions, college preparatory behaviors, academic engagement, and ninth-grade course enrollment. Treated students exhibit higher levels of college knowledge, efficacy, and grit, as well as a higher likelihood of conversing with school personnel about college. Additionally, treated students are more likely to enroll in advanced science/social science courses. We find mixed evidence on whether the visits increased students’ diligence on classroom tasks and a negative impact on students’ desire to attend technical school. Keywords: college access, experimental research, postsecondary education, program evaluation, rural education, socioemotional skills, survey research Both access to and success in higher education are important policy concerns, given the positive economic returns to postsecondary education and its potential to promote social mobility (Chetty et al., 2017; Oreopoulos & Petronijevic, 2013). In addition, the importance of a postsecondary degree is likely to increase over time, as demand for workers with formal postsecondary training continues to outpace supply (H. Johnson et al., 2015; National Center for Education Statistics, 2018) . For example, seven of the 10 occupations with the highest projected employment growth between 2018 and 2028 require a postsecondary credential (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020) . Unfortunately, many prospective students face nontrivial barriers to postsecondary access and success. Firstgeneration college students, 1 for example, are 19 percentage points less likely to enroll in college relative to students with at least one parent who graduated from college (Cataldiet al., 2018) . Researchers and policymakers typically focus on addressing three specific barriers to college: addressing credit constraints by providing financial aid, addressing information failures by providing information about college options and the matriculation process, and addressing gapsin students’ academic preparation via counseling, tutoring, and remediation (Page & Scott-Clayton, 2016) . While such interventions can affect college access, inequality in postsecondary enrollment, persistence, and completion rates across socioeconomic strata and racial/ethnic groups persist and may be growing (Avery et al., 2020; Bailey & Dynarski, 2011; Baker et al., 2018; Posselt et al., 2012) . These persistent opportunity gaps suggest the existence of additional Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License ([https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages ([https://us.s

FAQs

How were students assigned to the control and treatment groups?

Two cohorts of eighth graders were randomized within schools. The control group received a college informational packet, while the treatment group received the same packet plus three visits to a flagship university during an academic year.

Which student outcomes were measured to evaluate the impact?

The study estimates effects on college knowledge, postsecondary intentions, college preparatory behaviors, academic engagement, and ninth-grade course enrollment.

What were the main results of the campus visits?

Treated students had higher college knowledge, efficacy, and grit, were more likely to talk with school personnel about college, and were more likely to enroll in advanced science and social science courses. Evidence on diligence in classroom tasks was mixed, and there was a negative impact on students’ desire to attend technical school.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Adam