Let’s avoid sending underprivileged students back to the ’80s

Back in the early 1980s, a handful of incomplete forms were casting a shadow over Susan Dynarski’s prospects as a Harvard undergraduate.

“My parents divorced,” Dynarski reminisced. “And when I reached 18, my dad refused to complete the financial aid applications anymore — he claimed he wasn’t accountable for me now that I was an adult.”

This left Dynarski to finance her education without grants that reflected her actual financial need. Her single mother took several risks — securing new loans, putting a mortgage on their home in Somerville — and Dynarski completed her A.B. in social studies in 1987.

Four decades later, Dynarski is now at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, leading a group of scholars exploring the interface of economics and education.

It’s a vastly different era. There are well-maintained federal databases monitoring how and why students from diverse backgrounds enroll in college and their progress afterward. While tuition fees have significantly increased, financial aid is more abundant, and administrators are more attuned to the unique challenges faced by first-generation college students.

Nevertheless, low-income students — despite having excellent academic qualifications — continue to enroll in the nation’s top universities at significantly lower rates compared to similarly qualified peers.

Dynarski recalls experiencing financial strain while on campus. However, her recent research has concentrated less on the amount of funding available and more on the procedure for obtaining it.

“It’s not that individuals are unable to fill out forms,” Dynarski explained. “You could manage it, but it comes at a time cost. Moreover, the entire financial aid system delays providing information about your eligibility until after you’ve applied, been admitted, and received an offering from an institution — it backloads all that information.”

Beginning in 2015, Dynarski suggested an alternative. In collaboration with several colleagues at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, that state’s most prestigious university, she initiated what she termed the HAIL scholarship program.

Dynarski’s team identified young individuals who possessed both the academic credentials to be considered for admission to the Michigan flagship and the financial circumstances to attend for free if they enrolled.

The HAIL initiative aimed simply to inform those students of that reality.

During the fall of their senior year, eligible students in the “treatment group” received vibrant, celebratory packages, including what Dynarski and co-authors referred to as “an early, unconditional guarantee of tuition” for four years. (Their parents and school principals received similar communications.)

The outcomes were striking. Nearly 70 percent of eligible students who received HAIL notifications applied to Michigan, in contrast to just 26 percent of those who did not. Almost half of those who applied were admitted — significantly higher than the university’s overall acceptance rate. And 27 percent ultimately enrolled.

The impacts were also felt at selective institutions elsewhere. Moreover, notably, these impacts were achieved without introducing new financial aid.

“The intervention did not alter costs for these students; instead, it provided an early guarantee of grants for which they were already expected to qualify,” Dynarski and her coauthors highlighted in a 2018 paper.

This constitutes a form of “nudge,” a straightforward intervention that enhances a complex system: streamlining bureaucracy, boosting lifetime earnings, and enlarging the well-educated workforce.

With such insights, Dynarski has mobilized high-level economics for the public good.

“I have always been motivated by this, not due to a fascination with testing economic theories, but because I aspired to improve the world — to promote economic mobility,” she mentioned, noting her background as a union organizer for six years prior to fully establishing her academic career.

Her career, in turn, is nearly unimaginable without societal support.

In study after study, Dynarski has depended on extensive longitudinal datasets that only the federal government could sustain. Furthermore, she has garnered millions in research aid from the Institute for Education Sciences (IES), the research division of the U.S. Department of Education. For instance, the HAIL program would have posed considerable challenges without federal grants that enabled her to create a longitudinal data system still operational in Michigan.

A few years after joining Harvard, an ongoing partnership is now under significant threat.

Dynarski has a pending grant application with the IES, and — amid the intensifying funding conflict between Harvard and the Trump administration — suspects it is unlikely to succeed.

Simultaneously, proposed budget cuts
“““html

The initiative by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, intends to reduce the IES workforce from 100 individuals to merely three, indicating an almost complete eradication of the datasets that helped shape her professional journey.

Dynarski expressed that such a reduction could jeopardize the flourishing area of education economics — shuttering opportunities for the advancement of American lives and thrusting the nation back to the conditions of her youth, when families like hers faced hardships in anonymity.

“I feel as though this administration has targeted nearly everything I’ve dedicated my efforts to,” Dynarski commented. In a pessimistic outlook, she added, “It’s not simply that low-income individuals won’t secure positions as researchers — there won’t be American science.”

However, she remains optimistic. “You just identify where you can make an impact. I guide students. We still have state and local administrations — I invest my hopes in them.”

Moreover, just last month, she became a part of a lawsuit initiated by the National Academy of Education against the Department of Education, seeking to halt the proposed reductions.

“`