Students' Heterogeneous Preferences and the Uneven Spatial Distribution of Colleges

Chao Fu, Junjie Guo, Adam J. Smith and Alan T. Sorensen

No 28343, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We estimate a model of high school students' college choices, allowing for rich heterogeneity in students' preferences for college attributes. We use data on students' enrollment decisions and application decisions—i.e., the sets of colleges to which they applied—to identify the distribution of students' preferences. We use our estimates to quantify differences in a student's expected value upon college application that result from the uneven spatial distribution of colleges. As with other aspects of economic opportunity, we find that place matters: students with otherwise identical characteristics can have very different expected values depending on where they live. The importance of location reflects differences across states as well as differences across counties within a state. For students with low parental incomes and low SAT scores, over 70% of the variation is within-state across counties, while for students with high parental incomes and high SAT scores, 66% of the variation is across states.

JEL-codes: I2 I23 I24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-01
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Published as Chao Fu & Junjie Guo & Adam J. Smith & Alan Sorensen, 2022. "Students’ Heterogeneous Preferences and the Uneven Spatial Distribution of Colleges," Journal of Monetary Economics, .

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