A Revised and Updated Version of this Study Can Now be Found at : "http://ssrn.com/abstract=2241764" http://ssrn.com/abstract=2241764.This article summarizes the results of a longitudinal study of the U.S. News academic reputation scores between 1998 to 2012. Among other things, the study...

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 study a structural model of college admissions framed as a contest between a continuum of students for enrollment in a continuum of colleges where the contest outcome is decided by the students' choice of human capital (HC). Students have private information about their learning costs, and...

In identifying whether universities provide opportunities for low-income students, there is a measurement challenge: different institutions face students with different incomes and preparation. We show how a hypothetical university's “relevant pool”–the students from whom it could...

In the last few decades, college tuition costs have escalated to what some have described as astronomical levels. This has led to a heavier reliance by college students on alternative sources beyond family financing. Such sources have included grants, scholarships, private loans, federal loans...

Previous measures of the incidence of public investment in higher education focus on the transfer to public college students. This implies that the net benefits to students who do not attend public colleges is negative. However, they miss potential general equilibrium effects on the private...

Tracking is widespread in U.S. education. In post-secondary education alone, at least 71% of colleges use a test to track students. However, there are concerns that the most frequently used college placement exams lack validity and reliability, and unnecessarily place students from...

Students who attend different colleges in the U.S. end up with vastly different economic outcomes. We study the role of relative value-added across colleges within student choice sets in producing these outcome disparities. Linking high school, college, and earnings registries spanning the state...

While college enrollment has more-than doubled since 1970, elite colleges have barely increased supply, instead reducing admit rates. We show that straightforward reasons cannot explain this behavior. We propose a model where colleges compete on prestige, measured using relative selectivity or...