In this paper I investigate whether students self-select into the U.S. for-profit colleges or whether the choice of for-profit sector is accidental or due to the reasons external to the students (geographic exposure to for-profit providers, tuition pricing, or random circumstances). The main student-level data samples come from the National…

Most studies of student migration focus on "interstate" migration of college students, largely because the aggregate data typically used are limited in geographic specificity to states. However, interstate migration is only a small part of the total student migration. Public institutions generally get most of their students from within…