We estimate the impact of one of the largest college-to-student outreach efforts in the nation, the College Board's Student Search Service. In an oversubscribed "order," colleges receive contact information of a randomly chosen subset of PSAT and SAT exam takers who opt into the service and meet colleges' search criteria from a larger…

Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions but identifying their causal effects is notoriously difficult. Using admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings' college options, we present evidence from the United States, Chile, Sweden and Croatia that older siblings' college and…

Hispanic high school graduates have lower college completion rates than academically similar white students. As Hispanic students have been theorized to be more constrained in the college search and selection process, one potential policy lever is to increase the set of colleges to which these students apply and attend. In this paper, we…

This paper quantifies the extent of student-college "academic undermatch," which occurs when a student's academic credentials permit them access to a college or university that is more selective than the postsecondary alternative they actually choose. Using a nationally representative dataset, we find that 41 percent of students…

In 2010, 21 million students across the United States enrolled in one of nearly 4,500 postsecondary degree-granting institutions (Snyder & Dillow, 2011). Students of all academic backgrounds selected institutions they wanted to attend and, likewise, institutions made decisions about which students they wanted to admit. The resulting…

This study focuses on the postsecondary choices of all SAT[R] takers in the high school graduation cohort of 2006, who graduated from 3,172 public high schools in 17 states where the preponderance of college-aspiring students take the SAT, rather than the ACT. The data set analyzed is constructed by merging the College Board's student-level SAT…