Getting Paid to Sleep More Actually Raised College Students' Grades

The Sleep Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight

Everyone knows college students don't sleep enough. But a landmark new study has done something far more significant than simply confirm that fact — it has proven, for the first time, that directly improving students' sleep causes their grades to go up. That distinction between correlation and causation is enormous, and the findings are already turning heads in both academic and policy circles.

Published in the Journal of Political Economy, one of the world's top economics journals, the study provides the first causal evidence that improving sleep can directly enhance academic performance. In a large-scale field experiment involving more than 1,100 university students in the United States, researchers Osea Giuntella of the University of Pittsburgh, Silvia Saccardo of Carnegie Mellon, and Sally Sadoff of UC San Diego tested whether small monetary incentives could help students build better sleep habits and whether those habits would translate into higher grades.

Just How Sleep-Deprived Are College Students?

The baseline data alone is alarming. Students slept an average of just 6.6 hours per night at the outset. Only 43% met the recommended minimum of seven hours on weeknights, and more than 85% of participants failed to get seven hours on at least one school night each week. About half of students went to bed after 1 a.m. on average, and one in four went to bed after 2 a.m.

Nearly 29% of weeknights involved less than six hours of sleep — well below the roughly seven to nine hours generally recommended for adults. These aren't outliers. This is the norm for millions of students across the country, and the academic consequences, this study now confirms, are very real.

A Fitbit, an App, and $4.75 a Night

The intervention itself was elegantly simple. The study combined objective sleep tracking using Fitbits with a custom-built smartphone app that delivered bedtime reminders, real-time feedback, and immediate digital payments. The app allowed researchers to monitor engagement, track syncing behavior, and test how different combinations of cues, feedback, and incentives affected both short-term sleep and longer-term habits.

The treatment group was encouraged to get at least seven hours of sleep on weeknights, received personalized bedtime reminders, and was offered a modest financial incentive — $4.75 per night for four weeks — for meeting their nightly sleep goal. The control group simply wore the Fitbit trackers without receiving any instructions or rewards tied to changing their sleep habits. The results were striking. The intervention increased the share of nights with at least seven hours of sleep by 26 percent and average weeknight sleep by an estimated 19 minutes during the four-week treatment period, with persistent effects of about eight minutes per night during a one-to-five-week post-treatment period.

Grades Went Up — and Stayed Up

Students in the intervention group improved their average course performance by 0.075–0.089 grade points in their classes during the intervention semester, with a persistent effect of similar magnitude seen in the following semester. That carry-over effect is particularly noteworthy — it suggests that even a brief push toward healthier sleep can help students form habits that outlast the incentive itself.

The GPA improvements seen here either outperformed or were comparable to academic gains delivered by scholarship-style financial incentive programs — but at a fraction of the cost. The study's authors say the findings offer a promising, low-cost model for institutions looking to support student success without the significant financial investment typically required by traditional scholarship or incentive-based academic programs.

Participants also completed weekly surveys on time use, mental health, and cognitive performance, including tests of creativity and quantitative problem-solving — a rich dataset that allowed researchers to identify how changes in sleep patterns affected students' daily routines, stress, and academic productivity. As Giuntella put it, "What excites me most is that these are relatively simple interventions that could be adapted and tested in many different settings." With universities under growing pressure to improve student outcomes without ballooning budgets, a $4.75-a-night nudge toward bedtime may be one of the most cost-effective tools they've never tried.