The past few years have seen a shift in many universities' admission policies from test-required to either test-optional or test-blind. This paper uses laboratory experiments to examine students' reporting behavior given their application package and the school's interpretation of non-reported standardized test scores. We find that voluntary…

In a pilot program during the 2016-17 admissions cycle, the University of California, Berkeley invited many applicants for freshman admission to submit letters of recommendation. This proved controversial within the university, with concerns that this change would further disadvantage applicants from disadvantaged groups. To inform this debate, we…

This paper studies the causal impacts of public universities on the outcomes of their marginally admitted students. I use administrative admission records spanning all 35 public universities in Texas, which collectively enroll 10 percent of American public university students, to systematically identify and employ decentralized cutoffs in SAT/ACT…

While college enrollment has more-than doubled since 1970, elite colleges have barely increased supply, instead reducing admit rates. We show that straightforward reasons cannot explain this behavior. We propose a model where colleges compete on prestige, measured using relative selectivity or relative admit rates. A key comparative static of the…

Detecting racial discrimination using observational data is challenging because of the presence of unobservables that may be correlated with race. Using data made public in the SFFA v. Harvard case, we estimate discrimination in a setting where this concern is mitigated. Namely, we show that there is a substantial penalty against Asian Americans…

There is debate over whether Asian American students are admitted to selective colleges and universities at lower rates than white students with similar academic qualifications. However, there have been few empirical investigations of this issue, in large part due to a dearth of data. Here we present the results from analyzing 685,709 applications…

Affirmative action in higher education can lead to mismatch, where students admitted through preferential treatment struggle academically due to inadequate preparation before college. Although some students may face initial challenges, by providing access to quality education for talented individuals who might have otherwise been overlooked due to…

We introduce a model of the admissions process based upon standard agency theory and explore its implications with economics PhD admissions data from 2013-2019. We show that a subjective score that aggregates subjective ratings and recommendation letter features plays a more important role in determining admissions than an objective score based…

College admissions in many countries are based on a centrally administered test. Applicants invest a great deal of resources to improve their performance on the test, and there is growing concern about the large costs associated with these activities. We consider modifying such tests by introducing performance-disclosure policies that pool…

Using detailed admissions data made public in the SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC cases, we examine how racial preferences for under-represented minorities (URMs) affect their admissions to Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill. At Harvard, the admit rates for typical African American applicants are on average over four times larger than if they had been…

Selective college admissions are fundamentally a question of tradeoffs: Given capacity, admitting one student means rejecting another. Research to date has generally estimated average effects of college selectivity, and has been unable to distinguish between the effects on students gaining access and on those losing access under alternative…

College admissions in the U.S. is decentralized, with students applying separately to each school. This creates frictions in the college admissions process and, if substantial, might ultimately limit student choice. In this paper, we study the introduction of the Common Application (CA) platform, under which students submit a single application to…

Applications to elite US colleges have more than doubled over the past 20 years, with little change in the number of available seats. We examine how this increased competition has affected the admissions advantage that legacies and athletes (LA) receive. Using data on Harvard applications over 18 years, we show that non-legacy, non-athlete (NLNA)…

This paper examines how private college and university endowments affect financial aid, admissions selectivity, and the economic and racial composition of incoming students. Because endowment levels are a function of expenditures and alumni giving, which are endogenous to the outcomes of interest, the design exploits changes in endowments stemming…

Previous measures of the incidence of public investment in higher education focus on the transfer to public college students. This implies that the net benefits to students who do not attend public colleges is negative. However, they miss potential general equilibrium effects on the private college and labor markets. Changes in the public college…