Answering the call

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

Bibliographic Data

ID19230645
AuthorsCabeiri Debergh Robinson (0000-0002-0663-1589, Stanford University, corresponding author), Katharine Meyer (Brookings Institution), Chasity Bailey-Fakhoury (0000-0002-8721-1817, Grand Valley State University), Amirpasha Zandieh (University of Colorado Boulder), Susanna Loeb (0000-0003-1854-8843, Stanford University)
Year2026
Volume137
Pages103351
Publication date2026-07-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial Science Research (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0049-089X • E-ISSN: 1096-0317
PublisherElsevier BV (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1016/j.ssresearch.2026.103351
OpenAlexW7160289668
LanguageEN
References cited38

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

Affect (linguistics) · Attribution · Job attitude · Job performance · Salience (neuroscience) · Communication in Education and Healthcare · Emotional Labor in Professions · Job Satisfaction and Organizational Behavior

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