This Essay reviews and synthesizes contemporary social science research relevant to the constitutional question, in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin and more broadly, of whether consideration of socioeconomic status and percent plan admissions based on high school rank represent viable...

Despite increasing access to university education, students from disadvantaged or non-academic family backgrounds are still underrepresented at universities. In this regard, the economic literature mainly studies the effect of financial constraints on post-secondary educational decisions. Our...

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....

I show how local supply changes create ripple effects in a national educational market. Admitting an applicant to a program will free up a slot to be filled at her next-best alternative. To investigate such substitution effects I re-engineer the centralized admission system of the Danish...

We document gender differences in reactions to failure in the National College Entrance Exam, an extremely high-stakes exam that solely determines college admission outcomes for almost all teenagers in China. Using unique administrative data in Ningxia Province and a regression-discontinuity...

Large racial differences persist in college enrollment and major choice, which may be exacerbated by the racial distribution of high school teachers. In this paper, I present the first evidence that matching high school students with same-race teachers improves the students’ college outcomes....

Urban school districts nationwide have increased within-district choice for families. In response, district policymakers are overhauling the systems for applying to and enrolling in schools, with the goal of making it easier and more equitable for students to enroll in schools that are a good...

Household wealth and liquidity are key factors in individuals' college enrollment choices. Therefore we investigate the impact of housing wealth, credit availability and financial distress on college enrollment decisions. We find that housing wealth is negatively related to enrollment in public...

While there has been a substantial increase in the return to college (the college premium), college attainment has stagnated. We show that these facts can be reconciled by allowing for uncertainty in college payoffs, in particular around college completion and earnings, with borrowing. With...

Non-financial barriers to college are an important possible explanation for socioeconomic, racial, gender, and other gaps in college access and success. A sizeable economic literature documents policy efforts to understand and address these barriers. We review this literature on non-financial...