Carly D. Robinson, Katharine Meyer, Chastity Bailey-Fakhoury, Amirpasha Zandieh, Susanna Loeb
This paper presents findings from a randomized field experiment investigating how to best recruit college students as tutors. College students often must balance the goals of working to earn money and goals of contributing to the community, building career skills, and developing social relationships. Tutoring K-12 students can support each of these goals, benefiting both the tutored students and the college student tutors. Yet, college students decide on jobs with imperfect information about their potential benefits. As a result, they may rely on misleading heuristics (“interesting jobs pay badly”) that affect the jobs they pursue.
In partnership with Grand Valley State University, we randomly assigned college students to receive either a generic tutor recruitment email, or one of four targeted emails each making a different benefit of tutoring salient: (1) the monetary benefit of tutoring (emphasizing the hourly wage), (2) the prosocial benefits of tutoring (emphasizing how the K-12 students would benefit), (3) the social benefits of tutoring (emphasizing the chance to meet other peers), or (4) the career benefits of tutoring (emphasizing skills gained from tutoring).
We found that making the monetary benefits of a job salient increases the likelihood college students apply by 196%. There was no impact on application rates when recruitment messaging emphasized the prosocial, career, or social benefits of the job, despite students reporting these benefits as being the primary motivator for applying. This study highlights a simple, cost-effective strategy for recruiting college students to work as tutors.