Follow-Up Survey of Willingness to Pay (Choices) Study Participants - SRDC

Follow-Up Survey of Willingness to Pay (Choices) Study Participants

This project extends SRDC’s previous study on Willingness to Borrow for post-secondary education (PSE) – a project funded by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario and the now-defunct Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation. The original fieldwork used an innovative, laboratory experiment design to assess receptivity to various types of PSE financing among Canadian students in their final year of high school. The experiment took place during the 2008-09 academic year, and involved 1,248 students from 12 different schools in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Quebec. After completing the experiment, the vast majority of the original sample agreed to being contacted for a follow-up study.

This project initiates the follow-up survey to track ten years of post-high school outcomes among the original participating students. The survey is to generate a unique longitudinal data set for use by CIRANO and SRDC researchers, linking activities in the final year of high school to PSE enrolment and persistence outcomes in the context of a uniquely rich set of experimental and survey data from the original study, which captured preferences for PSE, willingness to pay and borrow as well as the experimental assignment of grants and loans. SRDC’s analysis of the follow-up project dataset will explore the role of less-understood barriers (e.g., price sensitivity and loan aversion) on PSE access, completion and labour market outcomes, particularly amongst under-represented groups.

It will permit baseline measures of preference, numeracy, tolerance for risk, and willingness to borrow to pay for PSE to be harnessed as predictors of later PSE and labour market outcomes, permitting policy makers to better understand who goes to PSE and why.

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