Starter Kit: A Program to Improve College Student Success

The Starter Kit program is applying insights from behavioral science to improve students’ college persistence and academic performance. Prior online programs designed by behavioral scientists have successfully improved college student (1) retention and (2) academic performance in a variety of ways, including by enhancing students’ feelings of belonging and teaching them a “growth mindset.^1-3,4 Inspired by this work, Starter Kit is deploying multiple behaviorally-informed programs designed to support college student success and testing their performance with the goal of identifying which are most effective overall and which work best for specific sub-populations. The different programs have been designed by members of the Behavior Change for Good Scientific Team, an interdisciplinary group of researchers founded by two professors at the University of Pennsylvania.

The 2025 Starter Kit program is launching with over 30 U.S. universities, collectively serving more than 700,000 undergraduates. The program has been informed by insights from previous research on how to successfully improve student success. Incoming students who participate receive a customized digital experience including two components: (1) an initial online activity that students will complete as part of their new student orientation, and (2) follow-up text messages sent after the online activity and throughout the fall term, which reinforce the key message of the initial experience and offer rewards to students for completing different related actions (e.g., sharing reflections on their college experience to date).

The goal of this partnership is to generate evidence on what can help colleges and universities best support their first-year students.

^{1 Murphy, M., et al (2020). A customized belonging intervention improves retention of socially disadvantaged students at a broad-access university. Science Advances.
2 Walton, G., et al. (2023). Where and with whom does a brief social-belonging intervention promote progress in college? Science.
3 Yeager, D., et al. (2016). Teaching a lay theory before college narrows achievement gaps at scale. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
4 Yeager, D. et al. (2019). A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement. Nature.}