Harvard professor presents higher education research
Susan Dynarski focused on higher education inequalities during the annual Clemens Lecture Series on Monday evening. Throughout the presentation, she explained her part in helping create a scholarship program that offered college students full four-year financial assistance.
Higher education accessibility was the topic of this year’s Clemens Lecture Series, which took place at the Stephen B. Humphrey Theater on Monday evening.
To celebrate 37 years since the beginning of the series, Dr. Susan Dynarski, an economist at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, presented her research conducted at The University of Michigan. Dynarski’s research focuses on reducing inequality by making higher education accessible to all.
Dynarski took part in founding the High Achieving Involved Leader (HAIL) Scholarship at the University of Michigan. The program continues to this day, offering students four years of financial assistance throughout their time at the university. “Receiving the scholarship shows that you have a commitment from us for four years of tuition,” Dynarski said. “It’s not just cheap talk, but it’s a commitment to each individual student.”
Students receive an invitation to apply in the mail as high school students. The students who are offered the opportunity are exceptionally high achieving and proven leaders at their high schools throughout Michigan.
Additionally, Dynarski shared the difficulties of successfully inviting students to apply for the program through mail invitations, as campaigns for secondary education lack definitive promises.
“We have strong evidence that information campaigns alone don’t work,” Dynarski said. “So just sending out more glossy pamphlets of generous ads without making commitments to the individual students doesn’t do a thing.”
Throughout the evening, Dynarski used large-scale datasets and quantitative methods with the use of graphs and charts to display correlation between income and available opportunities with educational attainment of students.
“HAIL is different from the previous interventions that had no impact,” Dynarski said, “It is a guarantee for individual students which is something that has actual economic value.”
SJU junior Bradyn Petrek majors in economics and attended the presentation Monday evening.
Petrek is a Pell grant recipient himself and shared how he admired the HAIL program and the efforts of the University of Michigan.
“The key takeaway was the way that the HAIL program supplies opportunity to high school students,” Petrek said. “I felt like it was a good conversation to have.”
CSB first-year Tess Cavanaugh is thinking about picking up a minor in economics alongside her theology major.
“This was a good concrete example of a woman who’s organized her life around looking at data and seeing how to change parts of our community or the broader community,” Cavanaugh said. “So that is definitely inspiring and something that I want to pursue.”
