HAIL To College Access

By Stacey Vanek Smith,

Cardiff Garcia

Published January 24, 2019 at 4:56 PM EST

Caleb Adams received the HAIL Scholarship, and is now a sophomore at the University of Michigan.

Research shows students who attend elite universities are more likely to graduate, and they earn higher incomes once they're in the labor market. But low-income students are underrepresented at those universities.

So Sue Dynarski, an economist at the University of Michigan, and her collaborators conducted an experiment to encourage high school seniors from low-income families in Michigan to apply to the school. Today on the Indicator, how that played out.

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Stacey Vanek Smith

Stacey Vanek Smith is the co-host of NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money. She's also a correspondent for Planet Money, where she covers business and economics. In this role, Smith has followed economic stories down the muddy back roads of Oklahoma to buy 100 barrels of oil; she's traveled to Pune, India, to track down the man who pitched the country's dramatic currency devaluation to the prime minister; and she's spoken with a North Korean woman who made a small fortune smuggling artificial sweetener in from China.

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