Curry School Prof. Benjamin Castleman published a book titled “The 160 Character Solution” this August, highlighting his research on a phenomenon known as “summer melt.”
“Summer melt” occurs when typically low-income students fail to enroll in college even after they are accepted.
The book particularly focuses on Castleman’s text-message campaign, which promotes sending text messages to students to remind them to apply for financial aid and complete the enrollment process.
“The purpose of the text campaigns are to provide lower-income, first-generation students and their families with simplified information, encouragement, and access to one-on-one advising with complicated college and financial aid tasks,” Castleman said in an email statement.
As students begin to consume media more and more, they are becoming more likely to encounter information that targets this media, Castleman said. Text messages are short, easily-digestible and easy to send.
“Across these campaigns we find that providing students with simplified information and access to one-on-one help via texting leads to substantial increases in the share of underrepresented students that enroll and persist in college,” Castleman said.
Castleman’s work has been featured in the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team Annual Report.
The text-message campaign focuses on lower-income students because many of these students are simply in an environment that isn’t conducive to prior knowledge about complex financial processes and opportunities, Castleman said.
Text messages allow more disadvantaged students to break down complicated bodies of information into pieces, he said.
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