Using detailed admissions data made public in the SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC cases, we examine how racial preferences for under-represented minorities (URMs) affect their admissions to Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill. At Harvard, the admit rates for typical African American applicants are on...

Purpose - As higher education continues to be buffeted by challenges, college and university leaders must find a way to respond to these environmental forces. In the United States, accreditation plays an increasing role in the quality control and improvement process. The goal of this research is...

In Fall 2014, Wellesley College began mandating pass/fail grading for courses taken by first-year, first-semester students, although instructors continued to record letter grades. We identify the causal effect of the policy on course choice and performance, using a...

This paper estimates the long-run impacts of banning affirmative action on men and women from under-represented minority (URM) racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Using data from the US Census and American Community Survey, we use a difference-in-differences framework to compare the...

This paper calls for the massive redesign of U.S. intercollegiate athletics departments in light of their widespread and fundamental failure to serve a bona fide student affairs mission. Part I of this article discusses the general purpose of student affairs departments within the broader...

Why do so many students mismatch when choosing a college? A plausible hypothesis is a lack of information about the likelihood of admission. This study contributes to the literature on mismatch by testing whether public university automatic admissions policies mitigate academic undermatch and...

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....

This appendix describes in detail the college site selection decisions used in the paper "How Do Institutions of Higher Education Affect Local Invention? Evidence from the Establishment of U.S. Colleges" (Andrews 2020)

We provide an empirical analysis of the determinants of cumulative Covid infection rates at over 1,100 US colleges and universities during the 2020-21 academic year. We propose a simple theoretical framework in which financially constrained educational institutions face a trade-off between...

We provide an empirical analysis of the determinants of cumulative COVID infection rates at over 1,100 US colleges and universities during the 2020-21 academic year. We propose a simple theoretical framework in which financially constrained educational institutions face a trade-off between...