DEMONSTRATED INTEREST: SIGNALING BEHAVIOR IN COLLEGE ADMISSIONS

In college admission decisions, important and possibly competing goals include increasing the quality of the freshman class and making the school more selective while attaining the targeted size of the incoming class. Especially for high‐quality applicants who receive multiple competing offers, colleges are concerned about the probability that these students accept the offers of admission. As a result, applicants' contacts with admissions offices, such as campus visits, can be viewed positively by the officers as demonstrated interest in the colleges. We provide empirical evidence on the effects of demonstrated interest on admission outcomes. Specifically, we use unique and comprehensive administrative data, which include all contacts made by each applicant to the admissions office of a medium‐sized highly selective university during two admission cycles. We find that an applicant who contacts the university is more likely to be admitted, and that the effect of the contact on the probability of admission is increasing in the applicant's Scholastic Assessment Test score, particularly when the contact is costly to make. We also use a numerical example to explore policies to reduce the inequity associated with the use of demonstrated interest in admission decisions, examining in particular the subsidization of costly demonstrated interest by low‐income students. (JEL D83, I23)     

Determinants of international university rankings scores

This article analyses the relationship between a university’s score in international university rankings, its expenditure per student and other factors such as university mission, size and productive inefficiency. We develop an economic model of rankings and universities and estimate this model with data on universities classified in the top 200 by the Times Higher Education Supplement ranking of 2007. We find that the elasticity of a university’s ranking score for the expenditure per student is between 4% and 9%, and that there are no clear signs of inefficiency in production among the top 200 universities. University mission and size are also significant predictors of ranking score. These results are especially interesting given the relevance attributed to rankings by government officials, university directors and students.     

HIGH SCHOOLS AND STUDENTS' INITIAL COLLEGES AND MAJORS

We use statewide administrative data from Missouri to examine the explanatory power of high schools over student sorting to colleges and majors at 4‐year public universities. We develop a “preparation and persistence index” (PPI) for each university‐by‐major cell in the Missouri system that captures dimensions of selectivity and rigor and allows for a detailed investigation of sorting. Our analysis shows that students' high schools predict the quality of the initial university, as measured by PPI, conditional on their own academic preparation, and that students from lower–socioeconomic status high schools systematically enroll at lower‐PPI universities. However, high schools offer little explanatory power over major placements within universities. (JEL I2, J1)     

The Effects of Individual and School Factors on University Students' Academic Performance

This article examines the factors that influence university students'academic performance, focusing on the role of student background and school factors. Using data on the first‐year students at the University of Western Australia in 2001, two methodologies are employed. The first is analogous to an input‐output approach, and the second is a random coefficients model. A key finding is that high schools have an impact on the academic performance of students at university beyond students' own background characteristics. Both immersion and reinforcement effects are identified.     

GAMING A SELECTIVE ADMISSIONS SYSTEM

A university uses both early-stage selection outcome (high-school affiliation) and late-stage admission test outcome (standardized test scores) to select students. We use this model to study policies that have been proposed to combat inefficient gaming in college admissions. Increasing university enrollment size can exacerbate gaming and worsen the selection outcome. Abolishing standardized tests for university admissions increases gaming targeting high-school admissions and worsens the selection outcome, whereas eliminating high-school ability sorting may improve the university selection outcome under some cost conditions of gaming. Committing to a lower-powered selection scheme can improve the selection outcome by reducing gaming behaviors.     

Grain inflation: Identifying agent discretion in response to a conditional school nutrition program

Many incentive programs rely on local agents with significant discretion to allocate benefits. We estimate the degree of discretion exercised by teachers within a conditional transfer program designed to improve nutrition and encourage student attendance in Mumbai, India. The program allocates grain to students every month their attendance exceeds 80% , creating an incentive for teachers to inflate attendance to benefit certain students. We find that teachers manipulate students' records, altering the incentives to attend school. The teachers' response also varies across students. Teachers inflate more for girls, better students, and students from lower castes, but less for Muslim students.     

An analysis of the German university admissions system

This paper analyzes the sequential admissions procedure for medical subjects at public universities in Germany. Complete information equilibrium outcomes are shown to be characterized by a stability condition that is adapted to the institutional constraints of the German system. I introduce matching problems with complex constraints and the notion of procedural stability. Two simple assumptions guarantee existence of a student optimal procedurally stable matching mechanism that is strategyproof for students. In the context of the German admissions problem, this mechanism weakly Pareto dominates all equilibrium outcomes of the currently employed procedure. Applications to school choice with affirmative action are also discussed.     

Measuring Efficiency: A Comparison of Multilevel Modelling and Data Envelopment Analysis in the Context of Higher Education

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) and multilevel modelling (MLM) are applied to a data set of 54,564 graduates from UK universities in 1993 to assess whether the choice of technique affects the measurement of universities’ performance. A methodology developed by Thanassoulis and Portela (2002; Education Economics, 10(2), pp. 183–207) allows each individual's DEA efficiency score to be decomposed into two components: one attributable to the university at which the student studied and the other attributable to the individual student. From the former component, a measure of each institution's teaching efficiency is derived and compared to the university effects from various multilevel models. The comparisons are made within four broad subjects: pure science, applied science, social science and arts. The results show that the rankings of universities derived from the DEA efficiencies which measure the universities’ own performance (i.e., having excluded the efforts of the individuals) are not strongly correlated with the university rankings derived from the university effects of the multilevel models. The data were also used to perform a university‐level DEA. The university efficiency scores derived from these DEAs are largely unrelated to the scores from the individual‐level DEAs, confirming a result from a smaller data set (Johnes, 2006a; European Journal of Operational Research, forthcoming). However, the university‐level DEAs provide efficiency scores which are generally strongly related to the university effects of the multilevel models.     

THE IMPACT OF HIGHLY PUBLICIZED CAMPUS SCANDALS ON COLLEGE OUTCOMES

Recently, many high‐profile scandals have occurred on college campuses. How might scandals affect colleges' outcomes? To investigate, we construct a dataset of scandals at the top 100 U.S. universities from 2001 to 2013. We find that scandals with significant media coverage substantially reduce applications. For example, a scandal covered in a long‐form news article leads to a 10% drop in applications the following year‐roughly the same impact of dropping ten spots in prominent college rankings. This impact persists for 2 years. We find no impact on incoming student body competitiveness, yield, or alumni donations, and little effect on deterring future scandals. (JEL L82, I23, D83)     

The negative effect of NCAA football bowl bans on university enrolment and applications

Universities provide consumption amenities to students in addition to their educational services. Collegiate sports programs have been characterized as one of these consumption amenities. Previous research has shown that athletic success has a positive impact on both the quantity and quality of students attending a university. Alternatively, we analyse if athletic malfeasance, as measured by NCAA postseason bans of football programs, negatively affects either the quantity or quality of student applications or enrolment. Our findings suggest that athletic malfeasance that results in a postseason football bowl ban lowers the quantity of applications, admittances and enrolment to a university. In addition, we find that universities respond to decreased application numbers by increasing their admission rates, while students who are admitted to the school enrol at the same rate as before the ban. Thus, the reduced enrolment is the result of a smaller applicant pool and not the result of a lower rate of enrolment. Lastly, we do not detect any reduction in student quality at the sanctioned university. Our results demonstrate that impropriety by an athletics program directly impacts a university’s non-athlete student enrolment by influencing the amenity mix provided by the university.     

Early decision and financial aid competition among need-blind colleges and universities

This paper presents a stylized theoretical model of competition among need-blind colleges and universities that implement early decision admissions. Under need-blind admissions, an applicant's financial aid status cannot affect their likelihood of admission. In the model, a need-blind school can use early decision admissions as a screening mechanism to indirectly identify a student's ability-to-pay, while superficially maintaining a need-blind policy. As a result, in equilibrium, non-financial aid students are more likely to be admitted than financial aid students of comparable quality.     

The impact of charter school attendance on student performance

We employ a panel of individual student data on math and reading test performance for five cohorts of students in Texas to study the impact of charter school attendance. We control for school mobility effects and distinguish movement to a charter school from movement within and between traditional public school districts. We find students experience poor test score growth in their initial year in a charter school, but that this is followed by recovery in the subsequent years. Failure to account for this pattern may lead to potentially misleading estimates of the impact of charter attendance on student achievement. Students who remain in charters largely recover from the initial disruption within approximately 3 years, and there is weak evidence that there may be overall gains from charter attendance within this period. Furthermore, students who return to traditional public schools after just 1 or 2 years in a charter do not appear to suffer a lasting negative impact despite their poor average performance in their first year of charter attendance.     

Selecting successful students? Undergraduate grades as an admission criterion

In Europe’s reformed education system, universities may be forced by law to consider undergraduate grade point average (UGPA) as the primary admission criterion in the selection of graduate students. In this article, we investigate whether UGPA predicts graduate student performance in order to discuss its usefulness as an admission criterion. In our theoretical framework, we show that undergraduate students may choose slower study progress in favour of receiving higher grades and conclude that UGPA is a relatively good (weak) predictor for graduate grade point average (study progress). Having data from a cohort of students whose selection was in clear conflict with the legal requirement, we empirically confirm our theoretical predictions by exploiting a unique opportunity for assessing educational policies. Discussion of our findings leads to some important conclusions concerning the Bologna reforms and the lawmakers’ idea of giving some independence to universities, but not too much of it.     

Competition Among Universities and the Emergence of the Élite Institution

We consider an environment where two education institutions compete by selecting the proportion of their funding devoted to teaching and research and the criteria for admission for their students, and where students choose whether and where to attend university. We study the relationship between the cost incurred by students for attending a university located away from their home town and the equilibrium configuration that emerges in the game played by the universities. Symmetric equilibria, where universities choose the same admission standard, only exist when the mobility cost is high; when the mobility cost is very low, there is no pure strategy equilibrium. For intermediate values of the mobility cost, only asymmetric equilibria may exist; the final section of the paper provides an example where asymmetric equilibria do indeed exist for a plausible and robust set of parameters.     

Weeds in the Ivy: college admissions under preference constraints

In a series of cases spanning more than three decades, the courts have attempted to establish boundaries on the permissible use of racial preferences in college admissions. Proponents of these policies believe that race-based preferences are needed to create a diverse student body that facilitates effective learning and social inclusion. Opponents of such policies contend that racial preferences are inherently discriminatory and eliminating them would yield a more able student body. Whereas race-based preferences have garnered the most attention, elite colleges regularly employ other types of preferences, including those for alumni and talented athletes. To inform this important policy debate, we develop a simple model comprised of a rational college administrator that maximizes a linear combination of student body ability and the college endowment through the choice of race, legacy and merit admission shares. We find that relaxing the racial-preferences constraint can produce a ‘less-able’ student body even when the college administrator places greater weight on student body ability than she does on the college endowment. The change in admissions policy may serve only to increase the number of admissions that can be ‘sold’ to wealthy alumni through legacy preferences and thereby foster the growth of weeds in the Ivy.     

Teaching (un)sustainability? University sustainability commitments and student experiences of introductory economics

The three largest public universities in British Columbia, Canada have signed the Talloires Declaration, committing themselves to promoting sustainability and creating expectations that they will integrate sustainability across the curriculum in order to improve students' environmental literacy and stewardship. About 40% of North American university students take a mainstream introductory economics course; few of these students take economics at more advanced levels. As such, introductory economics courses are an important vehicle for students to learn economic theory; they have the potential to contribute to the knowledge that students can mobilize to foster sustainability. Interviews were held with 54 students who had recently completed an introductory level mainstream economics course at one of the three universities. Students reported that introductory economics courses place little emphasis on the environment and sustainability, they recalled course content with normative connotations that are problematic from a sustainability perspective and they described how discussion of the limitations of mainstream theory was set aside. Student reports of the insights introductory economics offers into environmental problems imply that these courses are failing to substantively increase students' understanding of sustainability and linkages between the environment and the economy. Findings suggest that current introductory economics curriculum undermines the universities' sustainability commitments.     

Test scores,educational opportunities,and individual choice

A model combining student preferences for college with university admissions decisions is estimated to provide information on the role of test scores in the determination of post-secondary educational opportunities in the U.S. In contrast to implications of much of the recent criticism of tests and their use, we find that scholastic aptitude test scores are more strongly related to student application and choice of college ‘quality’ than to college admissions decisions. In addition, although there is a substantial correlation between test scores and high school performance, we find that both post-secondary school preferences and ultimate opportunities are related as much to performance in high school as to test scores themselves. Although SAT scores certainly exclude some persons from schools, our findings indicate that they do not represent an overriding constraint on the college opportunities of high school graduates.     

Public overspending in higher education

We study the trade-off between governmental investments in pretertiary and tertiary education from an efficiency point of view. We develop a model comprising agents with different incomes and abilities, public and private schools, and public universities that select applicants based on an admission exam. Reallocating governmental resources from tertiary to pretertiary education may positively affect aggregate production and human capital if some conditions are satisfied. For instance, in an economy with a high proportion of credit-constrained students, a reallocation of expenditure toward public schools benefits many students, compensating for the negative effect of a decrease in public university investments. We also quantitatively investigate the optimal allocation of public investment between pretertiary and tertiary education, and we find that a 10% increase in productivity of public investments in pretertiary education could increase the optimal GDP between 2.1% and 3%.     

A Student Learning Inventory for Economics Based on the Students' Experience of Learning: A Preliminary Study

The authors present the initial development of a student learning inventory (SLI) that is specific to economics. This approach, which is based on the student experience of learning (SEL) literature, emphasizes aspects of prior knowledge in the learning history of entering first-year students. Preliminary insights from a first SLI suggest that on entry to university, students show considerable variation in their perceptions of what economics is and what economists do. From the SEL perspective, such variation affects student learning. It is argued that continued development of an economic-specific SLI may result in a better understanding of students' learning engagement with economics and ultimately assist instructors in better understanding student learning difficulties and increase student success in first-year economics.