In the United States, if your parents attended a college or university, there is a good chance that you will, too.

But your chances are reduced if you come from a family with financial needs, a community with limited educational resources or have no one to follow as an example.

Helping those attain a college education is the motivation behind “nudging” or nudge theory, a way of changing people’s behavior through suggestion and support. Popularized in the 2008 book “Nudge,” the concept was a project of a legal expert and an economist with the University of Chicago.

Nudging includes emailing and texting students, offering advice and help. A growing number of U.S. colleges and universities look to nudging as way to support poor, minority and first-generation college students. 

But recent studies show that nudging is imperfect, and influencing large groups of students is not easy.

Alejandra Acosta is a higher education policy expert at New America, an independent research group. She said for the messages to be effective, they should meet certain benchmarks, such as:

* A nudge must be time-sensitive, meaning they reach college students well before the date a student is required to take action.

* A nudge should also be informative and written clearly. For example, if a student starts to struggle in class, school officials should offer more information than simply advising them to seek academic support, Acosta said. The message should include what kinds of support the college or university offers and how the student can make use of them.

* A nudge should be interactive, she added. Students should be able to ask questions or be directed to a website. Colleges and universities must ensure their support services are in place and working.

“You can’t expect to just send a nudge in a text or an email and be like, ‘OK, we’re done,’” Acosta said. “To change behavior, there has to be other supporting structures there, too.”

When nudges work, they can do a lot of good.

In 2017, a nudging campaign at four U.S. community colleges targeted nearly 10,000 first-year students in Ohio and Virginia. Older and minority students who agreed to receive nudges were 16 percent to 20 percent more likely to continue into their second year than those who did not.

However, Iris Palmer, a senior adviser for higher education and the workforce at New America, warns that even clear, informative and timely nudges can sometimes hurt more than help.

“An example of this would be: I’m a student who has never been to college before, my family has never been to college before. I come to college and I wonder if I’m college material,” Palmer said. “I get a message that says, ‘You’re getting a failing grade in this class. You need to come talk to your adviser.’ 

“And I think, ‘Oh, I’m failing. I wasn’t even college material to begin with. I should just leave now,’ ” she said.

Palmer said school officials should shape nudges to fit a student’s needs, including having nudge messages offer alternative solutions, as well as seeming to offer the student more than one option.

Nudges need to be personal and individual, appearing to be written for the individual, not a large group, she said.

Kelly Rosinger, assistant professor in the Department of Education Policy Studies at Penn State University, agrees. Nudging can be a low cost, useful way of getting students to meet relatively simple goals on time, she said, such as completing the U.S. government documents necessary for financial aid.

In fact, Rosinger said nudging has not been successful when dealing with large groups.

Rosinger and researchers studied nudging of more than 800,000 students through emails and text messages. Their study found that nudging had almost no effect on the number of students starting college, using financial aid or continuing from one year to the next.

Rosinger said she believed the study showed nudges failed because they were trying to reach a large number of students. This made the messages seem more general and, as a result, less effective. She suggested nudging works best when it comes from a local group working with a smaller numbers of students.

“Just getting a message from an organization you are familiar with can create more of that personalization,” she said. “It may make the message more salient to students when they’re getting it.”

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