The Push & The Shove

Let us recall the simpler days — the days when computers begrudgingly bent to our will, the days before the smartphone, when a computer was a piece to the puzzle, not the, our, ultimatum, the days when classrooms were littered of pads of paper, graphite dust, and fear-stricken eraser shreds, the days when lecture notes were a scarce commodity traded amongst the campus grey markets — the days before the world entered the classroom, the day before yesterday.

An email: it’s from the campus club you rarely attend. You’re still an ‘active’ member, contemplating the day you’ll attend again — after midterms, next semester — ah forget it, you say, knowing that it will most certainly continue to live on your resume. Swipe left.

An Instagram like: it’s from your sorority sister. She loves your new outfit — you’ll surely stand out on campus. Oh — she posted a comment too — another notification. Swipe left.

A Snapchat Story: it’s from your gap-year friend. He arrived at his hostel in Bangkok, eager to explore the culture so vastly different from his own. Another post. The water is vibrant blue — brighter than anything you’ve ever come across on your own accord — but it could very well just be the filter. Swipe left.

A message: it’s from a group chat consisting of your friends from high school. It was just a reaction to Austin’s covfefe meme dump from last night. Justine laughed out loud. You know she didn’t — she’s in an Introduction to Environmental Sciences class three states away. Swipe left.

You glance up, then you glance back down again — you contemplate the importance of today’s lecture — it’s not deserving of my attention, you tell yourself.

Three notifications stream in, but the class ends, you assume, as students begin to leave — you’ll work through those later.

When Steve Jobs strolled onto the stage 10 years ago and curried in one of the greatest revolutions of human history, he was met by applause, critique, mesmeric. “An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator” he stated boldly, and restated twice more — a one-size-fits all device that took the consumer electronics industry by storm.

It was a cell-phone, the best that had ever been created. It was not controlled with buttons, nor was it controlled with a pen — it was controlled with your finger. Your finger unlocked the world. Your finger became an extension of the device — the device was only as valuable as the finger that controlled it, and your finger was only as valuable as the device that clutched it. You were your iPhone and your iPhone was you.

The cell-phone revolution that came before was built atop the breadth of society’s social construct. The cell-phone became valuable out of necessity — a world uncertain met with the safety net of your familiar. It allowed you to speak, then to text — it allowed you to ask for help, to share ideas, and to communicate, with whereabouts an irrelevancy. We gained comfort and humans gained a superpower. Social constructs grew deeper, stronger, and more integral. Presence exploded. They were always on and we could no longer let go.

We wielded the superpower of constant connectedness & we thought it would topple the world. But it was not the phone that would conquer us, it was the capabilities it had not presented and the platform it enabled. The strongest relationship in our lives had become one between us and the world that disappeared into our palms. We trusted our phone more than anything we had ever trust before — our phone was as alive as we were alive — it was us. It held our relationships, our memories, and our conversations: the smartphone no longer represented an inanimate vector, but rather, a deeply personal snapshot of us.

When the App Store was introduced in 2008, it was littered with amusement, entertainment, and utility. Our iPhone suddenly became far more valuable in ways we previously could not imagine — a diet tracker, a measuring device, a thesaurus and a dictionary in one. Above all, there was something that stuck: social. With the addition of social networks, our phones suddenly became something much more than the facilitator of communication between our familiar, but also, the world unknown. The radical ideologies of digital community suddenly no longer relied alone on our will to provide, but wielded greater control through the vast data-crumbs we left behind. Your location? Facebook had that. Your favorite hours to browse? Facebook had that. Every relationship you have ever made? Facebook had that. Your animated portayal, a breathing cloud of data, could establish insights, insights into you, your habbits, your interests — everything. The tides had shifted — you no longer needed to access Facebook because Facebook could intervene to access you.

The intervention — the notification — fundamentally changed the role of your phone. The Blackberry — the Crackberry — had made communication addiction commonplace. You expected messages, and they came; you expected emails, and they came. You were at the will to those who you had trusted with that power — you wielded the secret key, the address, the number. The platform, the iPhone, introduced something different. Your expectation became a living, a breathing, entity — the apps that lived within your ecosystem grew, evolved, invented, iterated. The phone had a built-in expectation: it facilitated communication between those who called you, and those who you called — a middleman, proven. Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter become much more — they notified you of old friends looking to reconnect, of trending events, of ineffable and irreplaceable stories told through simple camera snaps. You no longer picked up your phone out of will — your phone began to tell you when to pick it up.

We are addicted — without question. Our phones have made us the smartest beings to ever step foot upon this planet. Information, knowledge is accessible like water from a tap — we can reach for it, and it can reach for us, in ways we could never have imagined. It is the fault, and the genius, of the platform.

You see: our addiction is not solely the fault of the platform, it is of the accessibility the platform provides us. The shift we have witnessed could be imagined like so: we stood amongst a dark room, enlightened with the degrees to which our closest friends and family stood in equal darkness, when suddenly, the room became bright, and we were now visible, accessible, to everyone. Companies could watch us, could learn from us, and could determine how to better intervene into our lives. Algorithms could study our every interaction, generating vast statistical analysis of our possible futures.

As deeply as we feel in control, we are largely the opposite. Our will is largely not controlled by our own, but by algorithms. Algorithms generate the touch points to which we are most responsive and the adventures we wish to travel. Every time we instinctively reach for our devices with the accompanying buzz or bing, we are largely fullfilling the task an algorithm requested of us. When Instagram sends you a notification about a Facebook friend that recently joined or recent activity you might have missed, burried beneath innocent information is a request and a bottom line. Instagram is telling you to follow that new profile and to explore those recent activities and the advertising that accompanies them. The social industry is no different than any other: they are faced with bottom lines, with growth targets, and revenue goals. Their product is our eyes — they craft our touch points and abuse them too.

It is no accident that we ended in this place, here, today — these technqiues are by design, and they have worked, and will continue to work.

Before “growth” engineers and viral pioneers, it was scientists and economists who colonized the field of behavioral insight. Behavioral insight lives in the blend of economics, political theory, and the psychological, social, and cognitive sciences. Here, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, economists and advisors of public policy, solidified the nudge, and later wrote about it in their 2009 best-seller Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. They describe a nudge as “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.” More simply put: designing frameworks to gently guide our irrationality towards smarter choices, whether in retirement planning, healthcare, or education.

In the aforementioned examples, Silicon Valley companies utilized nudging to guide us towards connecting with an old friend or enjoying an acquaintance’s post — things their algorithms largely thought we might be interested in or find helpful. Though, much of the nudging methodology is merely serving bottom lines — serving the addictions it helped form. That was not the intention of Sunstein and Thaler; they largely believe in the power of using the nudge for good. They describe this thought wavelength, this philosophy, as “libertarian paternalism,” a largely free-market, conservative ideology that promotes making hard decisions easy through altering the social environments in which they are made. The thought being that academics and experts would implement systems in such a way that gives rise to the whole through rationalized decision making. Thus, helping Americans live happier, healthier, and more full-filling lives through strong decision making — not necessarily on their part, but on the part of those who design the systems that form their rationality.

Throughout their book, Sunstein and Thaler cast their paternalistic insight onto the world around them — describing how the nudge can increase organ donation, reduce childhood obesity, increase retirement saving, and much more. They describe how the simple act of having to make choices—or to avoid them—can improve the outcomes of those choices. In an organ donation study, for example, making the choice to be, or to not be, an organ donor significantly increased the number of organ donors. Whether guilt had a toll on those who agreed, or the simplification of the process aided those who would otherwise already desire that of their estate—they largely do not know. But, that’s the whole point of the nudge. The field of behavioral economics, or as Benjamin Castleman likes to put it, behavioral insight, asks the foundational questions and “seeks to uncover the ways in which people are predictably irrational.” The nudge is merely the consideration to ask those questions and to implement their insights.

Imparted the tool, I must ask: if social companies can nudge us away from our lectures, why can our classrooms and professors not fight on the same plane and nudge us towards the education we seek?

“I am honored to be here with you today to testify about low cost, scalable solutions to increase college persistence and success, particularly among economically disadvantaged students. We’ve made considerable progress over the last decade, increasing the share of the populous that pursues post-secondary education. At the same time that we’ve witnessed improvements in college going, however, gaps in college completion between low and high income families have only widened over time. Recent innovations highlight the potential for low-cost, scalable strategies to reduce these inequalities. These innovations stem from the growing recognition that targeted information and advising about college and financial aid can play an essential role in helping students and families navigate critical junctures on the road to and through college.”

On a brisk March morning in 2015, Ben Castleman sat before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, testifying on behalf of EdPolicyWorks, The Center on Education Policy and Workforce Competitiveness, in an oversight hearing entitled Closing the Achievement Gap in Higher Education. “Ben is an Assistant Professor of Education and Public Policy at the University of Virginia, and the Founder and Director of the Nudge4 Solutions Lab at UVA. He is a senior advisor to Former First Lady Michelle Obama’s Reach Higher Initiative and is the Faculty Director of the University of Virginia-US Army Partnership on Veterans’ Education. Ben’s research develops scalable solutions in education and public policy by leveraging behavioral insights, data science, interactive technologies, and deep partnerships with public and private agencies and organizations. Ben leads Mrs. Obama’s Up Next campaign, a national text messaging campaign to improve college, financial aid, and loan repayment outcomes for young Americans.”

In 2014, EdPolicyWorks, the renowned educational policy think tank and joint collaboration of the Curry School of Education and the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, published two research papers co-authored by Benjamin L. Castleman and Lindsay C. Page:

1. Summer Nudging: Can Personalized Text Messages and Peer Mentor Outreach Increase College Going Among Low-Income High School Graduates?
2. Freshman Year Financial Aid Nudges: An Experiment to Increase FAFSA Renewal and College Persistence

“Lindsay Page is an assistant professor of research methodology at the School of Education and a research scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work focuses on quantitative methods and their application to questions regarding the effectiveness of educational policies and programs across the pre-school to postsecondary spectrum. Much of her recent work has focused on implementing large-scale randomized trials to investigate potential solutions to “summer melt,” the phenomenon that college-intending students fail to transition successfully from high school to college.”

Last year, my colleague Mohsin Sandhu had the opportunity to speak with Lindsay Page about her transformative research in utilizing nudge theory to tackle academia’s greatest problems —their conversation will largely shape the remainder of this article.

Universities have grown extensively over the last century, but their principal largely remains the same: tradition is a virtue, and that virtue sells. University enrollment is at an all-time high — despite the socioeconomic climate fighting against it. There are more university students today than there have ever been before, but we will likely see the greatest drop-out numbers this year too. Universities are complex organisms that remain sturdy representations of the historical. They are not broken, nor can they be fixed. They must evolve.

Castleman and Page are visionaries in educational policy and their work largely seeks to tackle two complex issues plaguing academia: summer melt and persistence. They seek to shrink the socioeconomic inequality gap between the educational attainment and achievement of upper-class students and their low-income counterparts. Today, half of students from high-income families receive a bachelor’s degree by 25, compared to fewer than 10% of their counterparts — a 45% attainment gap. The vast divide is largely not understood, but the EdPolicyWorks papers help to paint a higher fidelity picture of the problems.

Throughout the course of a student’s public education, tax-payers invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare them for the world, the workforce, and the university. Yet, many students fail to successfully make that ever-crucial leap. In the final years of high school, students are guided through the processes to make those leaps. They are guided through the basic skills the world demands of them, whether home economics, accounting, or algebra. They are guided through the process to explore the options for the future — to enter a trade, or to explore career interests, academic focuses, and the universities that align best with those interests. The key here is that students are guided — they are advised.

The jump from secondary education to higher education is not easy. It is especially not easy when you must enter that transition alone. Many high schools provide guidance to students wanting to make that leap. They are guided through the university analysis process, the application process, the financial aid process, and the scholarship exploration processes. But, there are many schools that don’t offer enough of this guidance, and the students they serve are largely at a disadvantage. Too, once a student graduates from high school, across the board, their advising stops — they are thrown into a limbo state with their only guidance being an empty university email account, largely with no one on the other end.

Before the congressional subcommittee, Castleman speaks of this advisment-gap and defines the systemic problem it promotes. “High school graduates who have been accepted to college and plan to enroll, still have to complete a complex array of financial and procedural tasks in order to successfully matriculate. Yet, they typically lack access to professional assistance during these months. The phenomena that we’ve called summer melt, my colleagues and I find that 20–30% of college intending high school graduates from urban districts fail to enroll anywhere in the year after high school, as a result of challenges they encounter in completing these tasks.” This lack of advisement during a confusing, transitional time pushes students towards never matriculating in the fall — their chance of an education melts away. Some reasons as to why this can occur are: missed deadlines in financial aid, documentation providence, and placement exams; un-resolved fears of the responsibilities and change to come; and home-town ties that promote the desire to avoid change.

To tackle these widespread problems, Castleman and Page devised strategies to utilize a tool that students are so deeply accustomed to, texting, as a means to provide guidance during deeply crucial touch-points. Using a low-cost, scalable text messaging vector, bursts of personalized information were delivered to students when they needed it the most. Reminders could be sent for upcoming deadlines; tips regarding financial aid could be sent with reference to the FAFSA process; personal contact could be established to address psychological threats and concerns. The low-touch mobile technology proactively brought more information to students, allowing them to go to college, and t0 have a greater chance to succeed when they got there. Because text messages are relatable to digital natives, there is a “confidence that at least for that moment of time, that content will reach students and grab their attention.”

By altering the college matriculation process through the lens of the nudge, proactive universities and policymakers have the power to tackle summer melt. The research from Castleman and Page proved an overwhelming success, “increasing the percentage of college intending high school graduates that will make it to campus by 10%, with the biggest impacts among the lowest income students.” Leveraging the behavioral insights of the process gap to nudge, worked—well. But, this research displayed just one creative implementation of behavioral insight and nudging towards academic problems — there are many great opportunities and touch-points waiting to be approached.

Once a student successfully matriculates, the greatest problem a university faces is engagement, persistence. The mind of a student is awoken in their first year — they are thrown into conditions where they are greatest likely to succeed, and yet, closest to fail. As a student develops their understanding of what it means to be a student, and to be a good student, their understanding is very much in flux. A freshman is thrown into a new world, into a rich environment of likemindedness, like-situation, buried by new responsibility. In their first semester, many students fail, out of pressure, out of fear, out of neglect. Those who continue are equally matured, and exhausted. As their first year comes to a close, many students want nothing to do with college. Escapism becomes their biggest threat.

After the first year, a student has the certain potential to succeed in college: they understand the role college lives, and must live, in their lives. However, it is the point where most students are lost — dubbed sophomore persistence. After their first year, students must reapply for financial aid, must re-enroll in courses — they are granted further responsibility of their education. Recent studies have found that a large percentage of students who do not continue after their first year do so largely because they failed to reapply for federal student aid. Those in need are disproportionally unable to apply for aid, with what appears to be an education problem: the education of the process. In their followup research, Castleman and Page went on to apply text message intervention and nudging to freshman embarking on their second year. They sought to tackle the persistence problem; to educate students on their new responsibilities and to guide them through the re-matriculation process. In a pilot study, the researchers found that “community college freshman who received these messages were 25% more likely to pursue through to sophomore year than students who didn’t receive the texts.”

In concluding his opening statement, Castleman paves the way for a great revolution of behavioral insight and technological innovation as tools for educational policy. “I think we’re just at the cusp of seeing how technology can be creatively leveraged to help students more effectively navigate what have been historically complex and challenging decisions. […] As long as students continue to encounter complexities on their road to and through college, creative leveraging of technology offers a low cost and scalable strategy to improve college persistence and success among disadvantaged students. Thank you again very much for the opportunity to testify before the subcommittee today.”

Gifted the power of the nudge, universities can be like social companies — they can intervene in student lives when most crucial and impactful.

Universities can wield the power of the platform—they can birth a technological renaissance of their own.

And soon, they must.

Through the new lens we can cast upon education, I ask: where must we look next?