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Answering the call: How changes to the salience of job characteristics affect college students’ decisions

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: College students often make employment decisions with incomplete information, particularly about compensation. As a result, they may rely on misleading heuristics (such as assuming that interesting or prosocial jobs pay badly) and overlook campus positions that would support both their financial needs and their development. We test whether highlighting job characteristics changes students' application behavior in a preregistered field experiment and find that it does. Increasing the salience of a tutoring job's monetary benefits nearly tripled application rates (a 196% increase). In contrast, messages emphasizing prosocial, career, or social benefits had no effect, despite students reporting these as their primary motivations for applying. The study highlights the incongruencies in college students' decision making alongside a simple, low-cost strategy for recruiting college students to enriching campus jobs.

Source: Social Science Research

DOI: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2026.103351

Authors: Carly D. Robinson, Katharine Meyer, Chasity Bailey-Fakhoury, Amirpasha Zandieh, Susanna Loeb

Institutions: Stanford University, Brookings Institution, Grand Valley State University, University of Colorado Boulder

Language: English

Topic: Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics

Subfield: General Decision Sciences

Field: Decision Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDGs: Decent work and economic growth, Quality education

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,020