Take HEART: Experimental evidence on enhanced advising and postsecondary progress

Many students leave college after appreciable progress toward a degree. Growing curricular complexity, dwindling financial aid, and meager mid-college advising may contribute to late departure. In an experiment conducted with a public 4-year university, we study an enhanced advising intervention (HEART) that targets students at least halfway through college. HEART includes access to a trained advisor with a reduced caseload, easy-to-digest information on remaining financial aid and academic progress, and a modest grant structured as an incentive over two terms. On average, although HEART generated additional and longer meetings between students and advisors, in which they discussed a wider array of topics than their counterparts in the control group, we fail to detect an appreciable effect of HEART on college completion. However, we find suggestive evidence of different effects by gender, with HEART hastening college completion among male students, and perhaps encouraging female students to augment their program of study. We find limited evidence of beneficial effects on postsecondary outcomes for other pre-specified subgroups, including students grouped by baseline propensity to complete college in 5 years. These findings indicate that medium-touch, mid-college interventions may be insufficient to boost college completion, at least markedly, while also offering insights into differences by student gender in responses to advising-heavy interventions in college.