Best and Brightest? The Impact of Student Visa Restrictiveness on Who Attends College in the US

Mingyu Chen, Jessica Howell and Jonathan Smith
Additional contact information
Jessica Howell: The College Board

Working Papers from Princeton University, Department of Economics, Industrial Relations Section.

Abstract: The F-1 student visa program brings more educated migrants to the US than any other immigration program, yet student visa applicants face an approximately 27 percent visa refusal rate that varies by time and region. Using data on the universe of SAT takers between 2004 and 2015 matched with college enrollment records, we examine how the anticipated F-1 visa restrictiveness influences US undergraduate enrollment outcomes of international students. Using an instrumental variables approach, we find that a higher anticipated F-1 student visa refusal rate decreases the number of international SAT takers, decreases the probability of sending SAT scores to US colleges, and decreases international student enrollment in the US. The decreases are larger among international students with higher measured academic achievement. We also document academic achievement of international students and show that over 40 percent of high-scoring international SAT takers do not pursue US college education.

Keywords: Human capital investment; migration; international student; F-1 studentvisa; immigration policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 I21 I23 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-04
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://dataspace.princeton.edu/bitstream/88435/dsp01c534fr83n/5/640.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Internal Server Error

Related works:
Journal Article: Best and brightest? The impact of student visa restrictiveness on who attends college in the US (2023)
Working Paper: Best and Brightest? The Impact of Student Visa Restrictiveness on Who Attends College in the US (2022)
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:pri:indrel:640

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Princeton University, Department of Economics, Industrial Relations Section. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bobray Bordelon ().