Editor’s Note: The work of UC Berkeley Social Sciences faculty helps shape California public policy. In this series, learn more about their research and projects and how they resonate with state policymakers and address solutions to the most pressing issues facing California, from food access to homelessness.
UC Berkeley Economics and Public Policy Professor Jesse Rothstein, an expert in education policy and the labor market, tackles critical California issues like criminal justice reform and homelessness through his leadership at the California Policy Lab (CPL).
Rothstein — who holds UC Berkeley’s Carmel P. Friesen Chair in Public Policy and David Pierpont Gardner Chair in Higher Education — is the faculty director for CPL’s UC Berkeley location. CPL conducts research on six policy topics in California — homelessness, health, the social safety net, labor and employment, criminal justice reform and education — and shares those research insights with local and state government agencies that shape public policy.
UC Berkeley Social Sciences spoke with Professor Rothstein about CPL’s research and how it benefits Californians, including UC students and low-income families. This interview has been edited for clarity.
Can you share more about the California Policy Lab (CPL) and the work you and other UC Berkeley Economics faculty are doing related to CA government policy?
Jesse Rothstein: California is a wonderful place to live, but we also face big challenges. As policymakers seek to address those challenges, the California Policy Lab is working to help them by bringing more evidence to policymaking in California. We do this by creating trusted research partnerships with state and local government agencies and then working with these agencies to generate research insights to show what programs and policies are working — and what could be improved.
Many important policies span these areas — for example, education programs can have important effects on participants’ employment, use of safety-net benefits, housing and criminal justice involvement. We often work at these intersections. We link together data across otherwise siloed programs and issue areas, allowing us to more deeply understand a specific problem and potential solutions. This can also help paint a more nuanced picture of the needs of people who may be enrolled in several government programs, and help think through strategies to better coordinate support for these individuals.
Our partners need research they can use for real-world decisions they’re making, so we’re very mindful of keeping that frame in our work. Many of the people on our leadership team have worked in senior levels of government, so that’s a big help in terms of being able to understand our partner’s needs for the research to be practical, timely and produced quickly.
Is there any research being done at CPL that you would like to highlight?
Jesse Rothstein: Here are a few examples that highlight the breadth of the issues we work on:
1. Through our Student Supports Project we’re helping to show how many college students in California are enrolled in CalFresh. CalFresh benefits help students pay for groceries, allowing them to devote their time to their schoolwork. We generated the first ever estimates of the number of students who participated in the program: In Fall 2021, nearly 15% of UC undergraduates (and nearly 16% at UC Berkeley!), 9% of UC graduate students and 11% of California community college students received CalFresh benefits.
But this is only a small share of the students who are eligible to receive benefits. In a recent report, we showed that only about 1 in 5 eligible UC undergraduate students (22%) are enrolled in CalFresh, and in the California Community College system, it’s only slightly higher, at 26%. That’s a significant take-up gap, and our goal is to help policymakers close that gap through improved outreach and better screening procedures. In upcoming research, we’ll show the actual amount of benefits students receive and also look at how many students stay enrolled when they transition from high school to college. We’re also measuring whether enrollment in CalFresh has impacts on student success outcomes — like persistence.
2. In the last decade, the state of California has made a number of changes to its criminal justice system, and we’ve been heavily involved in evaluating these efforts and also illuminating the impact of current policies. That ranges from showing the role sentence enhancements can play in increasing our state’s prison population to showing how diversion programs like the “Make it Right” program help justice-involved youth to make amends and dramatically reduce their likelihood of future contact with the system. We’ve also recently worked with the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office to launch the LA Prosecution Data Hub, which external researchers will be able to use to produce rigorous evidence on the outcomes from prosecutor policies and practices from the largest DA’s office in the country.
3. We’re also focused on efforts to help more low-income Californians receive the benefits they’re eligible for. For example, my colleague and Berkeley Economics and Public Policy Professor Hilary Hoynes co-authored a CPL report showing the expanded Child Tax Credit provided a $3.8 billion boost to low-income families, but also highlighted ways to get the credit to more eligible families who might have missed it.
We’ve tested ways to increase enrollment by running outreach experiments with our government partners. We found that a simple “nudge” email or recorded voice message dramatically increased the share of households who submitted simplified tax returns to claim the Child Tax Credit and other tax credits. In total, this led to $13.3 million more in people’s pockets. This type of work helps more Californians to get financial support they’re eligible for, which is especially important given the high cost of living in California.
4. We recently launched a new initiative, The California College Data and Policy Project (CCDPP), in collaboration with the Center for Studies in Higher Education. California’s public higher education system is unique in the world and can provide unequaled opportunities for economic advancement. But there is still a lot of work to do to improve it, and there are large racial and economic gaps in both achievement and educational attainment.
Through the CCDPP, we are going to bring the CPL model of researcher-government partnership and analysis of detailed administrative data to understand how to help students access and succeed in higher education. We are studying questions like: How can UC identify applicants who will benefit most from the opportunity to attend the university? How can we smooth and streamline the transfer student experience to improve student success?
What are some of the most notable CA state agencies that CPL has formed partnerships with?
Jesse Rothstein: We’re partnered with over 50 agencies, so it’s challenging to choose just one. Our Student Supports Initiative is one we’re very proud of because it involves a number of our partners working together with a common goal of better supporting college students with programs like CalFresh that can help pay for their groceries.
For that project, we’ve partnered with the California Student Aid Commission (CSAC), the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office (CCCCO), the University of California Office of the President (UCOP), the California Department of Education and the California Department of Social Services (CDSS). We’ve worked hard to develop these relationships and earn the trust of our partners, and the result is that we’re able to link together their data (such as enrollment, financial aid and CalFresh participation) in a way that’s never been done before. That allows us to paint a much clearer picture about the role CalFresh plays in supporting California college students, and if there are ways for it to support more students.
We are also able to help our agency partners work together to better support students in obtaining CalFresh benefits. For example, when CalFresh access was broadened during the pandemic, we were able to work very quickly to help CSAC and CDSS reach out to newly eligible students, and then to measure the impact of this outreach on student participation rates.
I mentioned our focus on researching what’s working in criminal justice reforms, and one of the key ways we do that is by serving as the research partner to the Committee on Revision of the Penal Code, a state agency that studies and makes recommendations to improve California’s criminal legal system. As part of that work, my colleagues have conducted a wide range of research ranging from showing the impacts from California’s Three Strikes law to our most recent report, which showed how many people are benefiting from California’s expansive automatic record relief laws. And we’ve also done a great deal of work with the Employment Development Department, through which we were able to generate unique-in-the-nation analyses of the labor market effects of the COVID pandemic that helped policymakers guide the state through that crisis.
While you asked about state agencies, I wanted to mention that we also partner with local agencies, which is important because those partnerships and the research that comes out of them can also inform policies at the state level (like new legislation), or policies in other cities or counties. One example is our partnership with the County of Santa Clara’s Public Defender’s Office, where we evaluated a pilot program they developed to provide faster access to legal representation for low-income people.
Intuitively, it makes sense that faster access would lead to better outcomes, but the impacts were surprisingly large. People who went through the program spent much less time in jail (23 fewer days, on average), were much less likely to be convicted (the probability of conviction was reduced by about 75% relative to comparative people who didn’t receive these services) and had a much lower likelihood of being convicted and a much higher likelihood of having their cases dismissed. We’re continuing this research with these partners and we’ve received inquiries from other localities who are interested in this model. State legislation has also been introduced that mirrors this pilot program’s goal of providing legal representation much earlier in the process.
What work are you doing internally to increase Berkeley Social Sciences' impact on California?
Jesse Rothstein: Our research is all oriented toward helping state agencies better serve Californians. But beyond the research we do, there are two other big ways we’re helping to increase the campus’ impact on California.
First, we’ve been very intentional about trying to democratize access to data so that more policy-focused research can happen in California. We do this by making data more available for research by faculty and students throughout the UC system (see our datasets here). We’ve facilitated hundreds of projects that are using data that our partners have provided to study a multitude of topics. The University of California Consumer Credit Panel, which we launched and manage, is being used by dozens of UC researchers on 50+ research projects related to financial wellbeing, ranging from student loans to debt collection, to understanding migration patterns in the state.
Second, we’re also working to help develop the next pipeline of policy researchers. For the past four years, we’ve offered our Undergraduate Summer Institute where we train a cohort of undergraduate students to do data analysis and policy research. We’ve also supported graduate students to do this work, including through our Seed Grants and Graduate Fellowships and many GSR-ships.
Can you talk about the UC Student and Policy Center in Sacramento?
Jesse Rothstein: We have good relationships with a number of state agencies because of the research projects we do with them, and we go to Sacramento frequently to present and testify on legislation like the benefits of improving data collection about California’s labor workforce. Because our research is policy-focused in nature, we also make a big effort to share it with policymakers, including through media, social media, our newsletter and presentations — like our recent webinar with Senator Nancy Skinner on college students and CalFresh
We are excited about the new UC Student and Policy Center in Sacramento, which will do a lot to deepen the university’s connection to Sacramento policymakers. We are in active conversations about how we can best work with them to increase our day-to-day presence in the capitol, whether that be by giving presentations there or even establishing an ongoing physical office in Sacramento.
