Students who attend different colleges in the U.S. end up with vastly different economic outcomes. We study the role of … outcomes of students who apply to and are admitted by the same set of institutions, as this approach strikingly balances …

particular, we use data on individual students' grades, SAT scores, and the SAT scores of their roommates at three schools to … three schools used, students in the middle of the SAT distribution do somewhat worse in terms of grades if they share a room … with a student who is in the bottom 15 percent of the SAT distribution. Students in the top of the SAT distribution appear …