Brief yet effective: group counseling and college access for disadvantaged students

Large socioeconomic gaps in higher-education access and completion persist even among similarly talented students with access to generous funding, pointing to an important role for information frictions and unequal support. We evaluate whether a brief, scalable program combining a customized information package with four one-hour group counseling sessions delivered during the school day by external counselors can improve postsecondary trajectories when students face complex financial-aid and higher-education decisions. In a randomized controlled trial with 26,853 students in 229 Chilean high schools, we assign schools to three groups: control, information only, and information plus group counseling. Linking administrative records and survey data, we find that information alone improves some dimensions of knowledge but does not significantly change funding applications or enrolment. By contrast, information plus counseling increases applications, enrolment, persistence, and short-degree completion. The counseling arm also generates larger gains in financial-aid knowledge and shifts students toward more reliable information sources, consistent with uncertainty reduction and procedural guidance as key mechanisms. Treatment effects are largest for students with less family support and weaker initial informational endowments, suggesting that counseling partly substitutes for missing support at home. The results indicate that in high-stakes, high-complexity settings, policy-relevant barriers extend beyond lack of information to difficulties in processing and acting on information. Structured counseling interventions of this kind can mitigate counselor scarcity and improve higher-education trajectories