Empowering and Inviting Parents of College Students with Actionable Mail: A Randomized Controlled Experiment at a Four-Year Public University

Abstract

Inviting and empowering parents via low-cost, light-touch mail-based interventions can have large effects in K-12 schools; we implement a similar intervention to increase second-year retention at a public four-year university. We find that the treatment did not noticeably affect second year retention rate or student academic performance, though the intervention may have changed parental beliefs in promising ways. In order for similar projects to be effective, we recommend that they target the parents of students who are academically qualified to return for their second year; focus the intervention on the spring and summer semesters before second year; communicate content that is exclusively relevant to re-enrollment to deliver focal messaging before parents habituate to the mailings; and, ideally, increase sample size by facilitating consent procedures consistent with FERPA regulations.