The Power of Certainty: Experimental Evidence on the Effective Design of Free Tuition Programs

This project would not have been possible without our collaborators at the University of Michigan Office of Enrollment Management, particularly Kedra Ishop, Steve Lonn, Paul Robinson, and Betsy Brown. We are grateful to the Michigan Department of Education (MDE) and Michigan’s Center for Educational Performance and Information (CEPI) for providing data. Seminar participants at the University of Michigan, Columbia Teachers College, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Wisconsin provided helpful comments. Sarah Cohodes, Joshua Goodman, CJ Libassi, and Matt Notowidigdo generously read initial drafts. The Institute of Education Sciences of the US Department of Education (through grants R305B1170015), the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program funded this research. This project was approved by the University of Michigan’s Health Sciences and Behavioral Sciences Institutional Review Board (under study research ID HUM00096289); Harvard University’s Institutional Review Board (IRB21-1221); and Colby College’s Institutional Review Board (2021-093). This study is registered at the randomized trial registry of the American Economic Association under RCT ID AEARCTR-0001831, with 10.1257/rct.1831-3.0. A pre-analysis plan was filed in August 2019 (Dynarski et al., 2019). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• data appendix

• March 24, 2022