Parental Influences on Postsecondary Decision Making: Evidence From a Text Messaging Experiment

Research increasingly points to the importance of parental engagement in children’s education. Yet, little research has investigated whether prompting parents to be more involved in college processes improves student outcomes. We investigate experimentally whether providing both students and their parents with personalized outreach about tasks students need to complete to enroll in college leads to improved college enrollment outcomes relative to providing outreach to students only. We utilize text messaging to provide information and advising to students and parents. Across treatment arms, the text outreach increased on-time college enrollment by a statistically significant 3.1 percentage points. Texting both parents and students, however, did not increase the efficacy of the outreach. We situate this result in the broader parental engagement literature.