Students' Heterogeneous Preferences and the Uneven Spatial Distribution of Colleges / Chao Fu, Junjie Guo, Adam J. Smith, Alan T. Sorensen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fu, Chao.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Guo, Junjie.

Smith, Adam J.

Sorensen, Alan T.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w28343.

NBER working paper series no. w28343

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2021.

Summary:

We estimate a model of high school students' college choices, allowing for rich heterogeneity in students' preferences for college attributes. We use data on students' enrollment decisions and application decisions--i.e., the sets of colleges to which they applied--to identify the distribution of students' preferences. We use our estimates to quantify differences in a student's expected value upon college application that result from the uneven spatial distribution of colleges. As with other aspects of economic opportunity, we find that place matters: students with otherwise identical characteristics can have very different expected values depending on where they live. The importance of location reflects differences across states as well as differences across counties within a state. For students with low parental incomes and low SAT scores, over 70% of the variation is within-state across counties, while for students with high parental incomes and high SAT scores, 66% of the variation is across states.

Notes:

Print version record

January 2021.