Match or Mismatch? Automatic Admissions and College Preferences of Low- and High-Income Students

Jane Arnold Lincove and Kalena E. Cortes

No 22559, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We examine the role of information in the college matching behavior of low- and high-income students, exploiting a state automatic admissions policy that provides some students with perfect a priori certainty of college admissions. We find that admissions certainty encourages college-ready low-income students to seek more rigorous universities. Low-income students who are less college-ready are not influenced by admissions certainty and are sensitive to college entrance exams scores. Most students also prefer campuses with students of similar race, income, and high school class rank, but only highly-qualified low-income students choose institutions where they have fewer same-race and same-income peers.

JEL-codes: I21 I23 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-gth
Note: CH ED LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22559.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:22559

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22559

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (wpc@nber.org).