This year, I started sending the top students in my ECONS101 class a 'student recognition letter', congratulating them on their performance and noting their overall grade and their ranking in the class. The purpose of this letter was not to try and sell these students on studying economics, but to provide them with some well-earned recognition, as well as a valuable signal for future employers that their A+ grade actually meant something (whereas in some papers, it clearly doesn't mean much).
I could have added a sentence or two encouraging those students to study more economics. They certainly have shown an aptitude for it. However, some years ago I did try to encourage the top students to study more economics, but it seemed like those efforts didn't have much impact. I stopped doing this in about 2018. And it seems I might have made a good choice, at least according to this forthcoming article in the journal Economics of Education Review (open access) by Olivia Edwards and Jonathan Meer (both Texas A&M University).
Edwards and Meer study the effect of a simple email from the professor to the top ten percent (or so) of the class in introductory economics at Texas A&M University:
...praising their performance and encouraging them to take more economics courses and considering majoring or minoring in economics if they were not already doing so.
Their analysis is based on 10,600 students who took the course between 2017 and 2023, of which 1802 received the encouragement email. Edwards and Meer apply a regression discontinuity design (RDD) approach to the analysis, essentially comparing students just above the cutoff mark for receiving the encouragement email with those just below the cutoff mark. The outcome variables Edwards and Meer look at are whether the student went on to study intermediate microeconomics, whether they majored or minored in economics, and whether they majored in an 'economics-adjacent field' (by which they mean agricultural economics or business). They also test whether the results differ by gender, under-represented minority (URM) status, and whether the student was first-in-family to study at university.
There did seem to be some effect on students going on to study intermediate microeconomics. For students around the cutoff point for receiving the encouragement email, there was:
...a relatively large and statistically significant discontinuity of 8.8 percentage points (s.e. = 3.3 percentage points), an increase of about 40 percent over the baseline level below the cutoff.
However, there was little evidence of an effect on majoring or minoring in economics, with both effects being statistically insignificant. Turning to whether there were heterogeneous effects based on demographic characteristics, the effect of the email on taking intermediate microeconomics did not differ significantly by gender, but the overall positive effect appears to have been concentrated among URM students and students who were first-in-family to attend university. The encouragement email had no effect on going onto an economics major or minor for any of the demographic groups.
Edwards and Meer describe the effect of the encouragement email as "modest". I would say it was disappointing, but not surprising. If Texas A&M is anything like Waikato, then once a student has chosen a particular major (or minor), it is actually quite difficult to induce them to switch, even if they later find that some other major or minor would be a better fit for them. In part, this is due to institutional barriers, such as the difficulty in navigating the change-of-enrolment process, or the necessity to take pre-requisites that students might have missed, or that the student may have 'spent' papers on a particular major that would be lost if they switch. It could also be that students simply don't like changing their minds (a 'status quo bias').
So, while a simple information intervention may not be enough to change students’ choice of major, it does seem capable of nudging some students into taking more economics. And on the plus side, sending an email doesn't cost the professor much, so even if it only encourages some additional enrolments in intermediate microeconomics, on a cost-benefit basis for the Economics Department, it is probably a net positive. Given these results, perhaps I was too hasty in stopping the explicit encouragement of my top students to study more economics? I may have to re-draft my student recognition letters for this trimester.
[HT: Tim Harford, last year]
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