The Case for Automatic Course Enrollment

Source: Dom Fou/Unsplash

In early 2020, my wife and I signed up for the Ann Arbor Twinkie Run, a 5K race during which one is strongly encouraged to eat Twinkies. The race was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, no refunds were issued, and I never heard from the organizers again.

That is until a few weeks ago when they emailed us that the Twinkie Run was back and we were automatically registered. We never would have signed up on our own: we weren’t in the best shape, we were hosting an out-of-town friend, and the forecast called for thunderstorms. But rather than just click "reply" and withdraw from the race, we ran it. Intentionally or not, the race organizers leveraged one of the most effective strategies in the behavioral science repertoire for nudging behavior: automatic enrollment.

The power of automatic enrollment

I have long argued here and in the professional development series I lead for colleges and organizations that higher education should leverage automatic enrollment far more than it does. Many resources are designed passively, waiting for students to arrive on their own, and they’re often accompanied by hassles such as appointment sign-ups, referrals, and/or applications. Not only does this impede busy and overwhelmed students from taking advantage of opportunities, but these barriers almost always result in equity gaps for Black, Hispanic, lower-income, and first-generation students. What automatic enrollment does is preserve individual choice while shifting the burden of action from being entirely on students.

One place where automatic enrollment could help colleges is in programs with a narrow funnel. For example, many community colleges have shared with me how hundreds of students compete for 50 or fewer seats in a nursing cohort. Even if every candidate is stellar, the majority will be rejected, with hundreds more entering the funnel each term. What colleges hope students will do is shift to another in-demand healthcare program (e.g., radiography, dental hygiene, paramedic) that has overlapping prerequisites with nursing, meaning students are already partway to graduation.

Instead of the normal script—a student learns that they didn’t make it into nursing and are encouraged to explore alternative programs—imagine everything was automatic. The student is informed that they’ve been matched with radiography, that they only need a semester’s worth of credits to finish, and they’ve already been signed up for the next set of required courses. Automatic enrollment could disrupt the usual conversation in a number of ways:

1. Some of the student’s emotional reaction may be blunted by focusing on being accepted by another program, not rejected by nursing.
2. Automatic enrollment offers a new status quo wherein inaction, or the path of least resistance, leads to the desired behavior. Just like me running a 5K I wouldn’t have run otherwise, students will consider programs that they wouldn't have otherwise if the burden to enroll does not fall entirely on them.
3. When a trusted source (e.g., your college) uses automatic enrollment, it endorses the behavior or creates an injunctive norm. In other words, the college is implicitly telling students “we think you should be a dental hygienist.”
4. Automatic enrollment also implies a social norm that other nursing hopefuls are switching to other programs, thus the student is not alone and may be joined in the new program by familiar faces.

Us following a successful Twinkie Run; we both won pint glasses!

Source: Emily O'Hara

Bear in mind that with automatic enrollment the student is still free to try again for nursing, pick a different healthcare profession, or quit altogether. But automatic enrollment frames that choice in a way that should nudge more students to enter other programs rather than get completely derailed when they’re squeezed out of the narrow funnel.

Automatic enrollment for education programs

In seeking evidence for automatic course enrollment, I found two interesting K-12 initiatives that successfully nudged students to participate in programs they would not have otherwise, and closed equity gaps in those programs.

Automatic enrollment for gifted testing

In the early 2000s, a Florida school district was identifying as "gifted" about twice as many White students as Black or Hispanic students. The district theorized that a major cause of this equity gap was the testing process itself, which relied on teachers or parents to refer a child for evaluation. For many reasons (e.g., racial/ethnic bias, lack of parental awareness, social norms), far fewer Black and Hispanic kids were even taking the gifted test.

So, from 2005 to 2008, the district’s 140 elementary schools automatically enrolled all third-graders who scored above the threshold for an evaluation. This policy led to an overall 45% increase in identifying gifted students, but the results were staggering for underprivileged students. The odds of being identified as gifted increased by 78% for Black students, 118% for Hispanic students, and 174% for students receiving free-or-reduced lunch (FRL) or English language learners. Sadly, the 2008 economic crisis caused the district to discontinue the program, and screening rates and equity gaps returned to their previous levels within a year.

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Automatic enrollment for advanced coursework

In 2010, Washington state began piloting Academic Acceleration: all 10^th and 11^th-grade students who meet state standards in English Language Arts and/or math are automatically enrolled in advanced courses in those subjects. Before Academic Acceleration, only one-third of qualified students enrolled in advanced courses, which are associated with higher standardized test scores, better high school and college graduation rates, lower student debt, and higher long-term earnings. Washington also wanted to close equity gaps, as underrepresented minority students (URMs) and students receiving FRL were even less likely to take advanced courses.

Average rates of qualification for and enrollment in advanced courses in the year preceding Washington schools implementing the Academic Acceleration program.

Source: Data from Austin, Backes, Goldhaber, Li, & Streich (2022)

Academic Acceleration worked. Overall enrollment in at least one advanced course increased by over 5 percentage points, with stronger effects among URMs and students receiving FRL. These results held regardless of qualification, meaning that both students who met state standards and those who did not were more likely to enroll in advanced courses. For those who did qualify, automatic enrollment likely changed the status quo and implied an endorsement by the school that “you (your child) should take this advanced class.” But the policy may have also shifted schoolwide social norms among students, teachers, and counselors who now saw more Black, Hispanic, and lower-income students taking advanced courses.

Automatic enrollment in higher education

While these studies focused on the impact of automatic enrollment in K-12 education, I believe college students could benefit from similar policies. On top of automatic course enrollment in places like healthcare pathways, colleges can also explore specific student success behaviors (e.g., visiting tutoring, attending office hours, career counseling) as opportunities for automatic enrollment. While such policies may sound paternalistic, as long as students are given clear, easy ways to opt out of courses or programs, there should be no undue coercion or other ethical concerns. In the end, it is simply a choice between placing the burden of action entirely upon students versus laying out a carefully designed path and inviting them to take it if they so choose.