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 …

. There is growing empirical evidence that low-income parents place lower weights on academics when choosing schools, but …The incentives and outcomes generated by public school choice depend to a large degree on parents' choice behavior … admission to students in randomly selected schools along with their CMS school choice forms. We find that receiving simplified …

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 …

college exposure to female instructors and students, consistent with a wider role for women's colleges in increasing female …

-semester students, although instructors continued to record letter grades. We identify the causal effect of the policy on course choice … and performance, using a regression-discontinuity-in-time design. Students shifted to lower-grading STEM courses in the … first semester, but did not increase their engagement with STEM in later semesters. Letter grades of first-semester 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 …