Reducing inequality in access to Higher Education in Denmark: Technical report for Nextstep 1.0 intervention and data collection

The aim of the project Reducing Inequality in Access to Higher Education was to raise the university application rate for upper secondary students whose parents did not themselves have a university degree. The project implemented an information intervention, and his technical report outlines the procedures involved in designing that the intervention called NextStep 1.0. It includes the selection and recruitment of schools, as well as the development of a survey for both students and counsellors and the creation of role model videos which was implemented in the intervention. The project Reducing Inequality in Access to Higher Education also included a NextStep 2.0 and a nudge experiment, which are not included in this technical report.

The NextStep study is funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark, Grant No. 8019-00100B in a project running from 2019 to 2024. The target group for the intervention was upper secondary students in the spring of 2020, when they were just three-five month from graduation.

In this report, we will address the following topics:

• The design of the intervention
• Randomization
• Recruitment of schools
• Data management including data to register data
• Intervention videos and home page activity
• Nudges
• Appendix with transcripts of intervention material including the survey