A Practitioner’s Guide to Nudging

Increasing Post-Secondary Enrolment Among Low-Income
Families: An H&R Block Project
Access to higher education is an important issue, especially among low-income families.
Financial aid programs have been developed to alleviate tuition costs in order to make
higher education more accessible. The US federal application for financial aid (FAFSA) is
a long and tedious process. It frustrates many students and families, yet it is an important
application that must be completed to qualify for many state and institutional grants.
A team of researchers partnered with H&R Block—a tax filing service company—to design
an intervention to reduce the complexity of the application process. 11 Researchers designed
software that worked with H&R Block’s tax filing software to extract information from an
individual’s income tax return and use the information to automatically fill in the FAFSA
form.
Approximately two-thirds of the form could be completed with the tax information provided,
and the remainder could be completed in less than 10 minutes with the help of a tax
professional and the researchers’ software.
Results of the research showed that families with high school seniors or recent graduates
were 40% more likely to submit the FAFSA application and were also 33% more likely to
receive a Pell Grant—a major needs-based federal grant.
FIGURE 5
SIMPLIFYING THE FINANCIAL AID APPLICATION PROCESS
Mindful
Mindless
Encourage Discourage Encourage Discourage
Boosting self-control
Activating a
desired behaviour
Externally
imposed
Selfimposed
Externally
imposed
X
PAGE 14 NUDGING: CASE STUDIES FILENE RESEARCH INSTITUTE