We use administrative data from Ireland to study differences in college application behavior between students from … completely on grades in the terminal high school examinations. Thus, we can compare the application choices of students who have … equal chances of admission to college programs. Conditional on achievement and college opportunities, we find that students …

role models on female preferences for STEM majors. We conduct a randomized control trial where female senior students … selected high schools. We find that exposure to this treatment increases high ability female students' preferences for … engineering programs by 14 percentage points. The effect is only statistically significant for the subgroup of female students …