Thread by @tressiemcphd

Next, I'm on to this new paper on how students understand college attainment returns:

Early Cost Realization and College Choice - Haewon Yoon, Yang Yang, Carey K. Morewedge, journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…

I know it is true* and that it is a perfectly fine way to situate a paper and get it published. Still, I will always cringe a little at this framing.

Setting up the Battle Royale! LOL (they're actually the same finding, conditioned on selectivity and practical college options but it's still fun.)

Okay pairwise model assuming same costs and practical options.

Their model proposes that students with different orientations to reward will also have different levels of psychological satisfaction (or maybe satiation is a better word) with college attainment that influences how they weigh the costs and benefits of taking on debt for tuition

Well that's just fascinating. And my mind is spinning through what this looks like. There are probably a hundred student profiles that would fit this LC-LR satiation principle. The student who is happy to have an ID card, degree be damned.

The student who gets a cultural capital boost from enrollment. (That's one I have frequently described in my research and found poor theoretical models for understanding it in research. Sometimes enrollment is attainment.)

Oh, that's an important caveat. It excludes a sizable portion of students and would definitely privilege some institutional types in the model's predictive power, I would presume. Less useful for community colleges, for example.

Wait, I had that backwards earlier. Now this makes less sense to me.

Now this makes more sense as a model for students who drop-out, tbh. Or that cycle through. Which means it is a shame that the exploratory dataset likely biased against CCs because that's their jam.

This continues to feel less satisfying the more I grok the modeling. I feel like we have one million theories and models for delayed gratification and college debt burden. And many of them stigmatize short-term costs/rationales.

Oh their experimental data is more interesting. Presenting temporally-bound information on costs and earnings increases likelihood of making what we might consider a "good" college choice.

The biggest challenge is that this is not disaggregated by major/degree. That is where a lot of variation in returns to attainment happen. The math on that equation far exceeds my mind's eye, though.

Oh, the authors acknowledge this.

This is fundamentally a tool for nudging through the most typical policy tool: the presentation of loan/debt information. It's a place where 4profits really excel, by the way. So this is important although I think its more likely that its institutions who need the nudge!

The organization of information may prime a psychological orientation towards time/temporality that makes the low return college more attractive because it fits a student's short-term satiation.

That's a direct jab at for-profit colleges' presentation of student loan information and for that reason alone, an intriguing paper.