Transparency and Percent Plans

Adam Kapor

No 32372, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Transparency vs. opacity is an important dimension of college admission policy. Colleges may gain useful information from a holistic review of applicants’ materials, but in doing so may contribute to uncertainty that discourages potential applicants with poor information. This paper investigates the impacts of admissions transparency in the context of Texas’ Top Ten Percent Plan, using survey and administrative data from Texas and a model of college applications, admissions, enrollment, grades, and persistence. I estimate that two thirds of the plan’s 9.1 point impact on top-decile students’ probability of attending a flagship university was due to information rather than mechanical effects. Students induced to enroll are more likely to come from low- income high schools, and academically outperform the students that they displace. These effects would be larger if complemented by financial-aid information, and are driven by transparency, not misalignment between the rules used for automatic and discretionary admissions.

JEL-codes: I21 I23 I24 I26 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des
Note: IO
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32372.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

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:32372

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32372
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

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 ().