Experimental evidence of the effects of an early intervention programme on economics student achievement

Early Intervention programmes are used in various ways in higher education in an attempt to identify struggling students at an early point in their coursework and to enable improvement in student outcomes. Despite being an increasingly common policy measure that is relatively easy to implement, little empirical evidence exists regarding the effectiveness of such programmes. Based on a study design that randomly assigns treatment eligibility across economics classes, we find that those who were reported for Early Intervention received final grades that were on average almost 4.3% higher than those who were not. The estimated effect of the programme on grade improvement, however, is smaller and not statistically significant. Some evidence exists for heterogeneous treatment effects, most notably the higher estimated effect for students in introductory classes.