Information and the Decision to Attend College: Evidence from the Texas GO Center Project

Some students who would bene…t from college may choose not to attend if they are unaware of all costs and bene…ts involved. In this case, publically provided information may induce personally optimal attendance decisions, and if such information is cheap enough to provide then government intervention may also be socially optimal. Evidence from the Texas “GO Center”project suggests that this may indeed be the case. GO Centers are novel high-school information and awareness centers, usually a dedicated classroom, that provide many traditional guidance counseling services –with the exception that they are run by student peers. They target academically prepared students who might not otherwise choose to attend college, providing motivation and information on all aspects of the college-going process. We use the roll-out of the program to identify its impact, along with detailed panel data on the universe of Texas public school students. The program signi…cantly increased college applications which led to increased enrollment rates, especially amongst Hispanic and low-income students. One-year college persistence rates also increased signi…cantly. These results have important policy implications, suggesting that a relatively cheap intervention can induce meaningful increases in human capital by reducing informational asymmetries. Corresponding author: Jesse Cunha, 579 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305, (650) 492-0381. We thank the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board for its support of this project, especially Susan Brown, Chris Alvarado, Don Brown, Catherine Dikes, Janet Beinke, Belinda Hernandez, and Nina Wright. We also thank Todd Witt and Ashley Cash for providing helpful institutional details regarding GO Centers, and Isaac McFarlin for providing distance data. We are grateful to Eric Hanushek, Giacomo De Giorgi, Caroline Hoxby, Doug Bernheim, Saar Golde, Paco Martorell, and Don Godin for their helpful comments and suggestions. This work was conducted while Darwin was supported by the Stanford Institute for Economic and Policy Research (SIEPR) Dissertation Fellowship, and Jesse was supported by the SIEPR Schulz Graduate Student Fellowship.