Acknowledgments vii Preface xiii Chapter 1. Educational Attainment: Overall Trends, Disparities, and the Public Universities We Study 1 Chapter 2. Bachelor's Degree Attainment on a National Level 20 Chapter 3. Finishing College at Public Universities 32 Chapter 4. Fields of Study, Time-to-Degree, and College Grades 57 Chapter 5. High Schools and "Undermatching" 87 Chapter 6. Test Scores and High School Grades as Predictors 112 Chapter 7. Transfer Students and the Path from Two-Year to Four-Year Colleges 134 Chapter 8. Financial Aid and Pricing on a National Level 149 Chapter 9. Financial Aid at Public Universities 166 Chapter 10. Institutional Selectivity and Institutional Effects 192 Chapter 11. Target Populations 207 Chapter 12. Looking Ahead 223 Appendix A. The Modern Evolution of America's Flagship Universities by Eugene M. Tobin 239 Notes 265 List of Figures 337 List of Tables 347 List of Appendix Tables 349 References 357 Index 377

Crossing the Finish Line:: Completing College at America’s Public Universities (Association for Institutional Research, May 30, 2010)

Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions, but causal identification of those effects is notoriously challenging. Using data from Chile, Croatia, Sweden, and the United States, we study within-family spillovers in college and major choice across a variety of national contexts. Exploiting college-specific admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings’ college options, we show that in all four countries a meaningful portion of younger siblings follow their older sibling to the same college or college-major combination. Older siblings are followed regardless of whether their target and counterfactual options have large, small, or even negative differences in quality. Spillover effects disappear, however, if the older sibling drops out of college, suggesting that older siblings’ college experiences matter. That siblings influence important human capital investment decisions across such varied contexts suggests that our findings are not an artifact of particular institutional detail but a more generalizable description of human behavior. Causal links between the postsecondary paths of close peers may partly explain persistent college enrollment inequalities between social groups, and this suggests that interventions to improve college access may have multiplier effects.

/pdf/o-brother-where-start-thou-sibling-spillovers-on-college-and-2gcxcjol1k.pdf

O Brother, Where Start Thou? Sibling Spillovers on College and Major Choice in Four Countries

Leadership positions in the U.S. are disproportionately held by graduates of a few highly selective private colleges.Could such colleges -which currently have many more students from high-income families than low-income families -increase the socioeconomic diversity of America's leaders by changing their admissions policies?We use anonymized admissions data from several private and public colleges linked to income tax records and SAT and ACT test scores to study this question.Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago) as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores.Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admissions rates for students with comparable test scores from high-income families; the remaining third is due to differences in rates of application and matriculation.In contrast, children from high-income families have no admissions advantage at flagship public colleges.The high-income admissions advantage at private colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, which tend to be stronger for students applying from private high schools that have affluent student bodies, and (3) recruitment of athletes, who tend to come from higher-income families.Using a new research design that isolates idiosyncratic variation in admissions decisions for waitlisted applicants, we show that attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases students' chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm.Ivy-Plus colleges have much smaller causal effects on average earnings, reconciling our findings with prior work that found smaller causal effects using variation in matriculation decisions conditional on admission.Adjusting for the value-added of the colleges that students attend, the three key factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas SAT/ACT scores and academic credentials are highly predictive of postcollege success.We conclude that highly selective private colleges currently amplify the persistence of privilege across generations, but could diversify the socioeconomic backgrounds of America's leaders by changing their admissions practices. 

Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges

Information acquisition and provision in school choice: An experimental study

/pdf/college-costs-financial-aid-and-student-decisions-30xf1chd.pdf

College Costs, Financial Aid, and Student Decisions

High-achieving, low-income students attend selective colleges at far lower rates than upper-income students with similar achievement. Behavioral biases, intensified by complexity and uncertainty in the admissions and aid process, may explain this gap. In a large-scale experiment we test an early commitment of free tuition at a flagship university. The intervention did not increase aid: rather, students were guaranteed before application the same grant aid that they would qualify for in expectation if admitted. The offer substantially increased application (68 percent versus 26 percent) and enrollment rates (27 percent versus 12 percent). The results suggest that uncertainty, present bias, and loss aversion loom large in students' college decisions.

Closing the Gap: The Effect of Reducing Complexity and Uncertainty in College Pricing on the Choices of Low-Income Students

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Closing the Gap: The Effect of Reducing Complexity and Uncertainty in College Pricing on the Choices of Low-Income Students