High school students have been through profound changes and challenges in the last three years. The experiences of the pandemic, lockdowns, virtual classes, and economic and social disruptions have had tremendous--and possibly lasting--impacts on them. As they prepare to enroll in college, have those experiences changed how they search for…

Over the last five years, Puerto Rico has faced fiscal and economic disruptions, demographic shifts, hurricanes and earthquakes, governance challenges, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. While most of these conditions are not new to Puerto Rico, the intersection of all these challenges created a nexus for institutional resilience and efforts. This…

This "2020 Perceptions of College Financing Report" provides insights that colleges and universities can use to engage students and families in conversations about cost. Ruffalo Noel Levitz (RNL), PLEXUSS, and RaiseMe sponsored this poll to identify the concerns high school students have about paying for college and the resources that…

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…

Using discontinuities within the Swedish SAT [scholastic aptitude test] system, we show that additional admission opportunities causally affect college choices. Students with high-educated parents change timing, colleges, and fields in ways that appear consistent with basic economic theory. In contrast, very talented students with low-educated…

This report assesses prospective student demand for specific graduate management education (GME) program types, both in terms of the program types they "consider" and the program types they "prefer." Prospective student profiles highlight key differences among those who prefer different program types. The report also examines…

For this factsheet, "Excelencia" in Education aggregated data on Latino students' educational aspirations, applications to college, and college choices from The High School Longitudinal Study of 2009. This study is a nationally representative longitudinal study that began with freshmen in 2009 and has followed them through secondary and…

Since 2008, Sallie Mae has surveyed American families with an undergraduate student about their attitudes toward college and how they paid for it. The "How America Pays for College" research has provided insight regarding families' belief in the value of a college education, how they are making college more affordable, the relationship…

Parents and guardians are the biggest influencers on enrollment for students. Nearly all are invested and involved in the college search process with their students. But are colleges and universities really engaging them? Are they communicating the right information, with the right frequency, across the right channels? Are they helping families…

Community college enrollment has been in decline nationally since peaking in 2010. This report puts the recent community college trends into perspective by reviewing community college enrollment from 2001 through 2017, and by examining concurrent trends that are related to community college enrollments. This report provides the reader with a…

Multiple studies have documented the positive effect of school choice on college attendance. We focus instead on the quality of colleges, which is linked to higher graduation rates and later-in-life wages, especially for Black and Hispanic students. We examine the effect of the New Orleans school reforms, a district-wide reform creating an almost…

In August 2020, the EdWeek Research Center conducted a nationally representative survey of more than 2,000 high-achieving recent high school graduates in order to better understand the coronavirus pandemic's impact on these young people as they prepared to transition from high school to college and the workforce. Survey results indicate most…

This 2017 summary report presents findings from the annual GMAC "mba.com Prospective Students Survey," which collected data from more than 11,000 prospective business school students who registered on mba.com from February to December 2016. The findings explore the career goals, preferred program types, and intended study destinations of…

This report is based on data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09), a nationally representative, longitudinal study of more than 23,000 ninth-graders in 2009. The cohort was surveyed again in spring 2012 when most students were in eleventh grade. This survey included questions about characteristics that would influence choosing…

Several of the key measures in this year's Student Academic Experience Survey have moved in a positive direction, but these movements have tended to be relatively small. Value-for-money perceptions have improved, but not statistically significantly, while there has been no change in the proportion who would choose the same course and institution…