Does increasing diversity in university-intake require sacrificing academic performance, and if so, by how much? We develop an empirical framework to explore this trade-off ex-post, using admissions-data matched with post-admission academic outcomes. We propose a simple, theoretical model of...

Widening access to higher education remains a significant policy challenge. While meeting student intake targets in university admissions is notoriously difficult, additionally pursuing access targets makes universities’ decision problem even more complicated. We introduce a choice procedure,...

The past few years have seen a shift in many universities' admission policies from test-required to either test-optional or test-blind. This paper uses laboratory experiments to examine students' reporting behavior given their application package and the school's interpretation of non-reported...

In Turkey, as in many other countries, female students perform better in high school and have higher test scores than males. Nevertheless, men still predominate at highly selective programs that lead to high-paying careers. The gender gap at elite schools is particularly puzzling because college...

In a centralized marketplace that was designed to be simple, we identify participants whose choices are dominated. Using administrative data from Hungary, we show that college applicants make obvious mistakes: they forgo the free opportunity to receive a tuition waiver worth thousands of...

We introduce a college admission with tuition transfers problem. In this novel formulation, students' payments are not necessarily equal to their respective tuition fees. However, the total requested tuition fees must be equal to the total payment burden on students. We introduce two mechanism...