With the hundreds of thousands of high school students who graduate every year, many of them make unwisdecisions about where to go to college or whether they should be going to college. A lot of them make the wrong choices about the institutions they enroll to, and a lot more even decide to never enroll at all.
In order to close this gap, a new approach in the form of text messaging was put in place to reach students during summer and encourage and remind them of the deadlines and the requirements of the college or university they intend to apply for. This is in fact a smart move because young people love to text and this form of communication has already somehow replaced phone calls.
In a study, 72 percent of low income students who got the text message decided to enroll in college, according to NY Times, compared to the 66.4 percent who were not able to get the information.
Another research suggests that college enrollment increased by 3.1 percent overall through information dissiminated through text messages and an 8.6 percent increase among low income students. Ben Castleman, a professor at the University of Virginia who co-authored the study, said that when the school counselors reached out to the students through text and Facebook messages, the results were more promising, according to the Huffington Post.
Castleman explained that the difference is that when a student receives a text message, the phone will chirp and vibrate and at first glancethe text will stand on its own without showing a lot of content or information unlike when it is sent through an Email or a Facebook feed.
He also added that this approach is something that we can leverage on when it comes to increasing our ability to access different populations in different fields.
