government and reached 30% of student loan applicants. We show that the low-income and low-achieving students who apply to low … correctly centered. Treatment causes low-income students to reduce their demand for low-return degrees by 4.6%, and increases …-earning college degree programs overestimate earnings for past graduates by over 100%, while beliefs for high-achieving students are …

best viewed as the end result of a learning process. We find that students enter college as open to a major in math or … science as to any other major group, but that a large number of students move away from math and science after realizing that … because students realize that their ability in math/science is lower than expected rather than because students realize that …

We use large-scale surveys of Chilean college applicants and college students to explore the way students form beliefs … to observed values for past students and follow survey participants forward to see how beliefs relate to matriculation … and dropout outcomes. We find that students have correctly centered but noisy cost expectations, and appear to …

Taking advantage of unique longitudinal data, we provide the first characterization of what college students believe at … of why students hold the initial beliefs about majors that they do. The data collection and analysis are based directly … that students enter school quite optimistic/interested about obtaining a science degree, but that relatively few students …

Using data on student outcomes and school choice lotteries from a low-income urban school district, we examine how …. The effects are largest for male students entering high school, whose truancy rates decline by 21% in the months after …