Friends in Higher Places: Can Exposure to High-Achieving Peers Raise University Aspirations for Disadvantaged Students?

Evidence from several countries suggests that low-income students tend to apply to lower-ranked universities than higher-income students with the same grades. In the US, this is often attributed to high ‘sticker prices’ for universities and a lack of transparency about financial aid. However, in the UK, domestic students face uniform tuition fees across universities, but we find similar patterns of ‘undermatching’ in that context, indicating that policymakers may also need to address non-financial barriers to ambitious applications. 

In this project, we use the UK university setting to study social exposure to elite universities as an important non-financial barrier to applications. We hypothesize that students are less likely to apply to an elite university if they do not know anyone who has attended it, and low-income students are less likely to know people attending elite universities through their school or family members. Our project has two complementary components. First, using national administrative data, we illustrate how application choices are affected by those of school peers and the disparities in these choices between schools. Second, we conduct a field experiment with university applicants at over 20 schools to isolate the effect of social exposure to universities on these patterns and to test interventions that may reduce these disparities. 

In data on all students in England, we find large disparities in application choices across schools with different income levels, controlling for grades. To demonstrate that these patterns can change, we focus on ‘breakthrough students’. We focus on schools from which no student has attended a particular elite university – e.g. the University of Cambridge – and then study how applications are affected after a first student ‘breaks through to attend that university. We find that applications to that university persistently increase after someone from the school breaks through, and that these applications pass through to a large increase in students’ probability of enrolling in and graduating from the university. However, applications to similar universities from the same school do not increase, indicating that this effect is not about a general increase in the ambition of university applications, but rather a specific effect of greater exposure to the particular university. 

We find that the students who attend the university after the first student breaks through tend to graduate at similar rates to observationally similar students at their school, and that they have somewhat improved outcomes once they start work, indicating that these students tend to benefit from attending the elite university. This suggests that at schools that never experience a breakthrough to the elite university, there are some talented students who would be able to succeed at the university if encouraged to apply by a breakthrough, but choose not to apply to the university in the absence of such a breakthrough. Such schools are disproportionately likely to have a low-income intake, and so the mechanism of a lack of exposure discouraging applications may drive some of the undermatching of students to elite universities in the UK. 

Having a student from a school attend a particular elite university may be an effective way to encourage applications from talented students at disadvantaged schools, but such breakthroughs may not be feasible to induce as a policy. We thus additionally seek to test different interventions that leverage the mechanisms that may underlie breakthrough effects, both to develop our understanding of why breakthrough students seem to encourage applications to these universities and to understand how to translate these effects into policies that could improve access to ambitious universities for disadvantaged students at scale. 

We hypothesize that one important mechanism is that students are more comfortable with applying to universities that they have some informal exposure to through their social networks. To test this mechanism, we will run an RCT with university applicants in the UK where we provide students with exposure to less familiar universities. We will randomly assign students to receive (a) travel subsidies for university visits, (b) one-on-one mentoring with current university students, and (c) videos of students discussing their university experiences. We will work with schools to combine these treatments with surveys and an in-school workshop on university applications, and we will evaluate whether these treatments encourage applications to and enrolment at less familiar universities. We will also measure changes in beliefs about different universities in response to the treatments. 

These interventions each allow students to meet and hear about universities that they may not be as familiar with, in a relatively natural and conversational context. Testing these interventions will allow us to understand whether interactions of this kind play an important role in driving the breakthrough effects that we observe in our observational data, and whether the scalable interventions that we test could help to close disparities in applications to elite universities; our measures of beliefs will allow us to understand which inputs into the application decision are most affected. Since the breakthrough students at a school are likely to be similar to future cohorts of students from the school, we will additionally evaluate whether demographic similarity strengthens the effects of the programme by randomly assigning students who receive mentors to either a demographically similar or dissimilar mentor and comparing the effects on applications to the mentor’s university. This will allow us to understand whether similarity and identification with the university student are important in driving the effects of exposure to universities, or whether any interactions (even with a dissimilar mentor) can have an effect. 

Taken together, the results in this project from administrative data and from our RCT will develop our insight into non-financial barriers to ambitious university applications for disadvantaged students, the reasons why exposure to universities may matter for applications, and scalable interventions that may help to close these gaps