College admissions officers face a rapidly changing policy environment where court decisions have limited the use of affirmative action. At the same time, there is mounting evidence that commonly used signals of college readiness, such as the SAT/ACTs, are subject to race and socioeconomic bias....

College admissions officers face a rapidly changing policy environment where court decisions have limited the use of affirmative action. At the same time, there is mounting evidence that commonly used signals of college readiness, such as the SAT/ACTs, are subject to race and socioeconomic bias....

Using detailed Danish administrative data covering the entire population of students entering higher education in the period 1985 to 2010, we investigate the importance of a student's peers in higher education for the decision to drop out. We use high school GPA as a predetermined measure of...

We present first experimental evidence that relative performance feedback improves both the speed and quality with which challenging long-term tasks are completed. Providing university students with ongoing relative feedback on accumulated course credits accelerates graduation by 0.12 SD, and...

The focus of the study was to determine if a difference existed with student academic level placement when utilizing traditional placement exams versus using high school performance metric multiple measure placement. Additionally, the study explored academic performance outcomes between similar...

I examine the effects of peer ethnic composition on college students' educational outcomes. I use a sample of freshmen cohorts from 1991 to 2002 at Texas universities from the Texas Higher Education Opportunity Project data. This paper identifies the Hispanic peer effects by exploiting the...

The reversing achievement gap across genders observed in many countries has led to a heated debate on the persistent gap in academia and other top fields. Using Turkish administrative data and the particular institutional characteristics, this pa- per aims to analyze the gender gap in...

This paper provides the first causal evidence on the impact of college advisor quality on student outcomes. To do so, we exploit a unique setting where students are randomly assigned to faculty advisors during their first year of college. We find that higher advisor value-added (VA)...

We examine the dramatic expansion in the Turkish higher education system during 2006-2008, which resulted in the establishment of 41 new public universities and a 60% increase in the number of available slots. Using the variation in the exposure intensity of expansion across cohorts and regions,...

The substantial rise in the college wage premium has led to large increases in postsecondary enrollment rates. However, many students fail to complete their degrees, and few invest in majors with the highest earnings potential such as those in STEM fields. To help students navigate the...