Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Earning a postsecondary credential is one of the surest paths to upward mobility in the United States today, yet too many college students do not graduate (d’Addio, 2007). Colleges and universities have several mechanisms to warn students that they are at risk of not making sufficient academic progress and to try to help students get back on track. Academic probation is one such mechanism. Almost every U. S. postsecondary institution has a probation process, and hundreds of thousands of students are placed on probation every year (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012). Yet little research has examined whether or how the academic probation process supports students’ return to good standing and ultimate receipt of a postsecondary credential. Concerningly, one paper claims that existing probation practices may actually increase students’ likelihood to drop out (Lindo, Sanders, & Oreopoulos, 2010).

Standard explanations for the continued academic difficulties of students on probation implicate insufficient motivation, skills, or resources. We suggest and test an additional explanation: contrary to schools’ intent, probation makes students feel ashamed and stigmatized, leading to disengagement from school. Moreover, we contend this can be changed to improve students experience and outcomes.

First, we test the assumption that administrators intend probation to be helpful to and motivating for students. More than two hundred administrators from diverse institutions report that they do. Next, we examine whether students infer administrators’ positive purposes for probation from existing probation notification letters. Probation letters from more than fifty institutions were collected and then evaluated by undergraduate students. While heterogeneity across letters was observed and students and administrators rated some purposes similarly (e.g., warning students about their status), students overwhelmingly interpreted fewer positive and more negative purposes than administrators intended. Furthermore, students who read existing probation notification letters or who reflected on their own probation experiences reported feeling high levels of shame and stigma.

Is it inevitable that probation letters elicit high levels of shame and stigma? No. We discuss a design process to develop and test revised probation notification letters at six universities. The revised letters drew on social-psychological theory concerning shame, stigma, belonging uncertainty, and implicit theories of intelligence (Goffmann, 1963; Hareli & Weiner, 2002; Walton & Cohen, 2007; Dweck, 2007).

Compared to existing notification letters, students rated revised letters as having more positive and less negative purposes. Furthermore, the revised letters decreased students’ feelings of shame and stigma and reduced their intentions to withdraw from crucial supports like tutoring or faculty, as well as from the university overall. While students’ psychological wellbeing is an important outcome in and of itself, student emotions and intentions are also critical pathways to improved academic outcomes.

Across schools, considerable heterogeneity was observed. At schools with existing letters rated as “worse” by students, effect sizes on shame, stigma, and engagement were larger than at schools with existing letters rated as “better” by students. Key questions remain about when and how this approach intersects with affordances of contexts to improve student outcomes. Potential applications to other domains are discussed.