Despite a robust college premium, college attendance rates in the US have remained stagnant and exhibit a substantial socioeconomic gradient. We focus on information gaps - specifically, incomplete information about college benefits and costs - as a potential explanation for these patterns. For...

Standard observed characteristics explain only part of the differences between men and women in education choices and labor market trajectories. Using an experiment to derive students' levels of overconfidence, and preferences for competitiveness and risk, this paper investigates whether these...

Access to information may represent an important barrier to learning about and ultimately transferring to 4-year colleges for low-income community college students. This paper explores the role that access to information technology, in particular, plays in enhancing, or possibly detracting from,...

This paper examines how the pandemic impacted the enrollment patterns, fields of study, and academic outcomes of students in the California Community College System, the largest higher-education system in the country. Enrollment dropped precipitously during the pandemic - the total number of...

Although enrollment at California's four-year public universities mostly remained unchanged by the pandemic, the effects were substantial for students at California Community Colleges, the largest higher education system in the country. This paper provides a detailed analysis of how the pandemic...

An extensive literature in the social sciences analyzes peer effects among students, but estimation is complicated by several major problems some of which cannot be solved even with random assignment. We design a field experiment and propose a new estimation technique to address these estimation...