This study describes how minority enrollment probabilities respond to changes in admission policies from affirmative-action to merit-only programs and then to percentage plans when the demographic composition of the potential pool of applicants is also shifting. It takes advantage of admission...

We empirically examine whether there is discernable variation in the matriculation patterns of low-income students at public flagship institutions in the United States around changes in institutional financial-aid policies that target resident, low-income students with need-based aid. While...

We use survey data on cohorts of high school graduates observed before and after the Italian reform of tertiary education implementing the 'Bologna process' to estimate the impact of the reform on the decision to go to college. We find that individuals leaving high school after the reform have a...

Private higher education institutions (PrHEIs) are utilized to complement public provision due to financial constraints faced in public provision. However, increasing private provision has raised interesting questions as to who gets educated in these PrHEIs. Is increasing private supply...

This paper studies the determinants of college major choice using a unique "information" experiment embedded in a survey. We first ask respondents their self-beliefs - beliefs about their own expected earnings and other major-specific outcomes conditional on various majors, their population...

This paper evaluates the effects of a high school curriculum reform on students' probability to enroll at university and to choose Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematics (STEM) as college major. The reform that was introduced in one German state increased the degree of difficulty to...

There is growing concern that the U.S. is producing too few college graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, and there is a desire to understand how various policies affect college major decisions. This paper uses student administrative records from the...

We study the impact of a student's ordinal rank in a high school cohort on educational attainment several years later. To identify a causal effect, we compare multiple cohorts within the same school, exploiting idiosyncratic variation in cohort composition. We find that a student's ordinal rank...

We examine the impact of an information intervention offered to 97 randomly chosen high schools in Finland. Graduating students in treatment schools were surveyed and given information on the labor market prospects associated with detailed post-secondary programs. A third of the students report...

We use the recent introduction of tuition fees at public universities in seven of the sixteen German states to identify the effects of tuition fees on university enrollment of first-year students at German public universities. Our study differs from previous research in two important ways....