Julie Pernaudet, École polytechnique (France), Invited Post-doctoral Researcher at CIRANO and Researcher at the University of Chicago, presented during a lunchtime seminar.

Growing concerns about the capacity of grant policies to reduce the socioeconomic gap in college enrollment call to investigate the conditions required for these policies to reach their target. This paper aims at better understanding the role of information barriers in the low take-up of higher education grants among disadvantaged students. Based on a Canadian lab-in-the-field experiment, I model the demand for grants among high-school students as a function of their perceived utility of university, which depends on their level of information on higher education and on the labor market. I use the model to simulate the effects of several information policies that are commonly implemented in high schools to address the difficulties students may face in the transition to higher education, but are rarely studied. While receiving information on the financial aid system demonstrates to be particularly effective, meeting a school counsellor or taking a skills and interests test also significantly raises the take-up of grants among disadvantaged students. Simulations suggest these policies could close the take-up gap with their more advantaged counterparts.