Let’s not send low-income students back to the ’80s

Back in the early 1980s, a few pages of incomplete paperwork were casting a shadow over Susan Dynarski’s future as a Harvard undergraduate.

“My parents got divorced,” Dynarski recalled. “And when I turned 18, my dad refused to fill out the financial aid forms any longer — he said he wasn’t responsible for me since I had come of age.”

That left Dynarski to pay tuition without grants that reflected her true financial need. Her single mother took a few risks — opening new loans, taking a mortgage on their Somerville home — and Dynarski earned her A.B. in social studies in 1987.

Forty years on, Dynarski is now at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, at the front of a wave of scholars working at the intersection of economics and education.

It’s a very different moment. There are well-maintained federal databases tracking how and why students from all backgrounds enroll in college and how they fare once there. And while tuition is markedly more expensive, financial aid is more generous, and administrators are more attuned to the special challenges confronting first-generation college students.

Even still, low-income students — even with sterling academic qualifications — tend to enroll at the nation’s top schools at far lower rates than peers who are similarly qualified.

Dynarski remembers being cash-strapped on campus. But her recent work has focused less on the amount of money available than the process for securing it.

“It’s not that people can’t fill out forms,” Dynarski said. “You could figure it out, but it’s a time cost. And then the whole structure of the financial aid process delays knowing about your eligibility until after you’ve applied, been accepted, and gotten an offer from an institution — it backloads all of that information.”

Starting in 2015, Dynarski proposed an alternative. Along with several colleagues at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, that state’s most selective university, she launched what came to be called the HAIL scholarship program.

Dynarski’s team identified young people who had both the academic credentials to have a chance of admission to the Michigan flagship, and the economic circumstances to attend for free if they enrolled.

The HAIL trial aimed, simply, to let those students know that fact.

In the fall of their senior year, eligible students in the “treatment group” were sent colorful, celebratory packages, including what Dynarski and co-authors call “an early, unconditional guarantee of tuition” for four years. (Their parents and school principals received similar messages.)

The effects were remarkable. Nearly 70 percent of eligible students who received HAIL notices applied to Michigan, compared to 26 percent of those who didn’t. Almost half of those who applied were accepted — much higher than the university’s acceptance rate for all applicants. And 27 percent went on to enroll.

The effects extended to selective schools elsewhere, too. And, perhaps most impressive, those effects were achieved without offering new aid.

“The intervention did not change costs for these students: Rather, it offered an early guarantee of grants for which, in expectation, they were already eligible,” Dynarski and her coauthors noted in a 2018 paper.

It’s a kind of “nudge,” a simple intervention that improves a complex system: simplifying bureaucracy, growing lifetime earnings, and expanding the well-trained workforce.

With that and other findings, Dynarski has marshaled high-level economics to work in the public interest.

“I was always in this, not because I’m into testing economic theories, but because I wanted to make the world better — to advance economic mobility,” she said, pointing out that she was a union organizer for six years before her academic career fully took shape.

And her career, in turn, is almost unthinkable without public support.

In study after study, Dynarski has relied on large, longitudinal datasets that only the federal government could maintain. And she has received millions in research support from the Institute for Education Sciences (IES), the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education. The HAIL program, for instance, would have been much more difficult without federal grants that allowed her to set up a longitudinal data system still running in Michigan.

Just a few years after coming to Harvard, an ongoing symbiosis is now in considerable doubt.

Dynarski has a grant request outstanding with the IES, and — amid the escalating funding fight between Harvard and the Trump administration — assumes it’s dead.

Meanwhile, cuts proposed by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, aim to shrink the IES from 100 employees to just three, meaning a near-total elimination of the datasets on which she her built her career.

Dynarski said such a cut could imperil the booming subfield of education economics — closing a window on the progress of American lives and catapulting the country back to where it was when she was a teenager, and families like hers were struggling in obscurity.

“I feel like this administration has attacked just about everything I’ve been working for,” Dynarski said. In the worst-case scenario, she adds, “It’s not just that low-income people won’t be able to get jobs as scientists — there won’t be American science.”

But she’s not yet discouraged. “You just pick where you can make a difference. I advise students. We still have state governments, local governments — I put my hope into them.”

And, just last month, she joined a lawsuit filed by the National Academy of Education against the Department of Education, aiming to block the planned cuts.