Going to university is a key route to enhancing life opportunities for young people and for promoting social mobility. Despite the action of widening participation programs, substantial sociodemographic inequalities in participation persist. Few studies have focused on the role that school attended may play in exacerbating or mitigating these…

Contextual admissions schemes are commonly used across the United Kingdom (UK) for admission into higher education (HE) institutions. These schemes consider an applicant's background and circumstances alongside academic achievement to provide a fairer evaluation of progression into university. Several contextual factors have been considered by HE…

This paper investigates the role played by self-confidence in college applications. Using incentivized experiments, we measure the self-confidence of more than 2,000 students applying to colleges in France. The best female students and students from low socioeconomic status (low-SES) significantly underestimate their rank in the grade distribution…

For many open-enrolled higher education institutions, including community colleges, enrollment is dropping each semester creating significant financial challenges. While much research literature focuses on four-year colleges, little is known about the students who seek to enroll at community colleges. What is known is often evaluated using college…

This study investigates how personality and individual experiences influence decision-making processes during the transition into Higher Education (HE). It offers insights into application choices, where applicants employ different quantitative hedging strategies against non-admission. These strategies are assessed by the number of applications…

The decision to enroll in college is not a single choice but rather the final step of a much longer process in which students make a series of choices regarding how to think about, research, and decide on enrolling. Traditionally, enrollment managers have used the enrollment funnel as a model to focus resources and efforts on acquiring and…

This study explores why African American first-year students admitted to the University of California Davis decline their offer of admissions. The objective is to help the University successfully achieve their goal of supporting greater diversity and representation of students from historically underrepresented minority communities and…

We reveal the current level of flexible admission systems (FAS) at UK universities, and explore its impact on student enrollment rates. We employ quantitative analysis techniques for data collected and customized from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) in the UK, during the period 2010-2015. To understand the impact of FAS on student…

Students who attend different colleges in the U.S. end up with vastly different economic outcomes. We study the role of relative value-added across colleges within student choice sets in producing these outcome disparities. Linking high school, college, and earnings registries spanning the state of Texas, we identify relative college value-added…

This paper examines how financial aid reform based on postsecondary institutional performance impacts student choice. Federal and state regulations often reflect concerns about the private, for-profit sector's poor employment outcomes and high loan defaults, despite the sector's possible theoretical advantages. We use student level data to examine…

Less-advantaged students are under-represented at prestigious universities, but can we infer that they actively avoid them? This research measured university applicants' knowledge of 115 UK universities. Using card-sort tasks within an interview format, 56 Year 13 students from different types of 16-19 education described how they chose five…

Access to higher education begins with a student's decision whether and where to apply to college. This paper examines racial and ethnic differences in college application behavior of high school graduates, using two recent graduation cohorts from Texas. We estimate racial and ethnic differences in the probability of applying to college,…

A growing body of literature is demonstrating that a number of students who are academically prepared for postsecondary fail to make the transition to college. The purpose of this study is to explore the relative influence of student and school level factors on three stages in students' college-going process: application, admission, and…

The Coalition of Asian American Associations (CAAA) and Asian American Coalition for Education (AACE), two small but vocal groups of Asian Americans, have argued against affirmative action practices. One of their more prominent claims is that Asian American applicants who are not accepted and do not attend their first-choice colleges face a…

Researchers investigating progression to higher education (HE) have suggested that student and school characteristics (e.g., gender, prior academic attainment, social background, type of school) are important factors affecting HE participation and the type of HE institution attended (Chowdry et al., 2013; Boliver, 2013; Vidal Rodeiro, Sutch, &…