I've written a couple of times about information interventions designed to attract more female students to study economics (see here and here). The results have generally been disappointing. That shouldn't be too much of a surprise. If it was really simple to get people to change their behaviour with information, then advertising would be far more effective than it actually is.
The latest paper I read on this topic, though, does seem to provide some evidence in favour of a particular information intervention, although the evidence is not particularly strong. This 2019 article by Amanda Bayer, Syon Bhanot (both Swarthmore College), and Fernando Lozano (Pomona College), published in the journal AEA Papers and Proceedings (ungated earlier version here), looks at an intervention applied to 2710 incoming first-year students across nine highly selective liberal arts colleges in 2016. The intervention was targeted at female students and under-represented minorities (URM). As Bayer et al. explain:
We randomly assign all incoming women and URM students to one of three experimental conditions: (i) a control condition with no email messaging; (ii) a “Welcome” treatment that consisted of two emails encouraging students to consider enrolling in economics courses; and (iii) a “Welcome+Info” treatment of two emails that encouraged students to consider enrolling in economics courses, but also included information showcasing the diversity of research and researchers within economics, with links to educational materials on the AEA’s website.
The good news is that the 'Welcome+Info' treatment appears to work, when looking at whether students take an economics course in their first semester at college, as:
...the Welcome treatment is associated with a 1.5 percentage point increase in the probability of taking a course, but this difference is not statistically significant (p = 0.38). However, the Welcome+Info treatment increases the likelihood of completing an economics course by 3.0 percentage points; the effect is statistically significant at the 10 percent level (p = 0.09) and substantial relative to the 15.2 percent probability that a student in the control group takes an economics course...
The effect is relatively large, but only marginally statistically significant. But when Bayer et al. look instead at whether students took any economics course across their whole first year of college, the effect is "positive but smaller and not statistically significant". That suggests that female and URM students may be simply shifting economics courses that they were planning on taking in their second semester into their first semester instead. However, Bayer et al. report that looking at the second semester shows no significant negative effects (which is what you would see if students were transferring from the second semester to the first). Perhaps then it is that their analysis is simply insufficiently statistically powered to detect an effect? The point estimates on the analysis of the full first year imply about a 1.2 percent increase in probability of taking any economics course in the first year of study (and no difference between the 'Welcome' and 'Welcome+Info' treatments). That's not zero, but not particularly large.
However, Bayer et al. also report that:
...the results are particularly striking for first-generation college students, where the Welcome+Info treatment is associated with a 11.4 percentage point increase in the likelihood of taking economics (p = 0.07), while the Welcome email has essentially no effect on these same students.
It wouldn't surprise me that an information intervention has a larger effect on first-in-family students, because those students can't as easily draw on the experience of their family in choosing the best course of study. However, overall this study can be added to the growing collection of weak evidence for the effect of information interventions on students' (and especially female and URM students') choice about whether to study economics or not.
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