The impact of lowering non-financial barriers on access to post-secondary education: updated final report

Life After High School is a research project supported by Canada Student Loans to develop, implement and test a new intervention to lower non-financial barriers on access to post-secondary education. The objective of the intervention is to increase the proportion of students who access post-secondary education and student financial aid. The overall goal of the project is to determine to what extent the intervention achieves this objective among graduating students from high schools with low post-secondary enrolment rates. The project involved the following three major design components: (1) develop an intervention that provides labour market information about the economic benefits of post-secondary education - increased earnings and employment; (2) implement the intervention in British Columbia (BC) among students who could enrol in post-secondary education within 12 months; and (3) evaluate how effective the intervention is at nudging Grade 12 students. The main purpose of the final report is to present the impacts of offering Life After High School to selected high schools with low post-secondary transition rates in BC, using administrative data files on secondary, post-secondary, and financial aid information. In order that the results can be placed in context, the report also presents a detailed description of the Life After High School Project (section one) and its implementation (section two). Section three presents the impact results. The report then concludes with lessons learned (section four) during the implementation and analysis of the intervention.

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