Benjamin Castleman

About

Benjamin Castleman is a professor of public policy and education at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on policies and strategies to improve postsecondary educational and workforce outcomes for individuals from lower-income communities. Castleman conducts this research through collaborative research-policy partnerships with public agencies and organizations at the local, state, and federal levels. His current work emphasizes innovations to increase economic mobility among lower-wage adults and examines the economic and life outcomes generated by intensive college advising programs. His research has been published in top journals such as The American Economic Review, The Journal of Labor Economics, The Journal of Public Economics, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Castleman has received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and his work has been supported by numerous philanthropic foundations and covered extensively in media outlets including The New York Times, National Public Radio, and The Washington Post. Prior to his academic career, he was a public school teacher and administrator in Providence, Rhode Island.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Psychology
• Medicine
• Medical education
• Business
• Sociology
• Social psychology
• Computer Science
• Economics
• Economic growth

Selected publications

• Negative Impacts From the Shift to Online Learning During the COVID-19 Crisis: Evidence From a Statewide Community College System

  AERA Open · 2022 · 144 citations

  The COVID-19 pandemic led to an abrupt shift from in-person to virtual instruction in the spring of 2020. We use two complementary difference-in-differences frameworks: one that leverages within-instructor-by-course variation on whether students started their spring 2020 courses in person or online and another that incorporates student fixed effects. We estimate the impact of this shift on the academic performance of Virginia’s community college students. With both approaches, we find modest neg…

  PublisherDOI

• Nudging at scale: Experimental evidence from FAFSA completion campaigns

  Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization · 2021 · 104 citations

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Can Text Message Nudges Improve Academic Outcomes in College? Evidence from a West Virginia Initiative

  Review of higher education/˜The œreview of higher education · 2020 · 52 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Although socioeconomic disparities in college enrollment have declined, gaps in college completion persist by income and geography. We investigate a text messaging campaign in West Virginia, which addressed informational barriers and behavioral obstacles to college persistence by providing college students with simplified information, encouragement, and access to individualized advising. Using descriptive and matching methods, we find participating students were more likely to remain enrolled th…

  DOI

• Bringing Transparency to Predictive Analytics: A Systematic Comparison of Predictive Modeling Methods in Higher Education

  AERA Open · 2021-01-01 · 40 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Colleges have increasingly turned to predictive analytics to target at-risk students for additional support. Most of the predictive analytic applications in higher education are proprietary, with private companies offering little transparency about their underlying models. We address this lack of transparency by systematically comparing two important dimensions: (1) different approaches to sample and variable construction and how these affect model accuracy and (2) how the selection of predictiv…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The effect of reduced student loan borrowing on academic performance and default: Evidence from a loan counseling experiment

  Journal of Public Economics · 2021 · 39 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Richard C. Cabot

  1996 shared

• Tracy B. Mallory

  The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

  847 shared

• Virginia W. Towne

  Harvard University

  741 shared

• Edith E. Parris

  658 shared

• Betty U. McNeely

  301 shared

• Betty U. Kibbee

  285 shared

• Robert E. Scully

  University of St Andrews

  172 shared

• Lindsay C. Page

  29 shared

Awards & honors

• Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers

Similar researchers at University of Virginia

• Christopher J. Ruhmh-79
• Michael D. Williamsh-71
• Charles Holth-61