Higher education.

• Position: Program and Working Group Meetings

The NBER's Working Group on Higher Education met in Cambridge on May 2. Charles T. Clotfelter of NBER and Duke University organized the meeting. These papers were discussed:

Kalena E. Cortes, Syracuse University, and Isaac McFarlin, Jr., University of Texas-Dallas, "College Quality and the Texas Top 10% Plan: Implications for Minority Students"

Amanda D. Pallais, MIT, "Why Not Apply? The Effect of Application Costs on College Applications for Low-Income Students"

Basit Zafar, Northwestern University, "College Major Choice and the Gender Gap"

Scott E. Carrell, UC, Davis, and James E. West, United States Air Force Academy, "Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors" Jason M. Fletcher, Yale University, and Marta Tienda, Princeton University, "High School Peer Networks and College Success: Lessons from Texas"

Stephen Desjardins and Brian McCall, University of Michigan, "The Impact of the Gates Millennium Scholars Program on the College Enrollment, Borrowing, and Work Behavior of Low-Income Minority Students"

Cortes and McFarlin analyze the benefits of attending selective public colleges in the context of race-sensitive admissions: they estimate how college quality and the admissions-policy change, from affirmative action to the Top 10% Plan, affect college completion. Their results show that all students who attended selective colleges have higher college completion rates than their comparable counterparts who attended less selective colleges. Moreover, there is little evidence to support the minority "mismatch hypothesis." The effect of the admissions-policy change for non-top 10 percent students is negative and three times larger for minorities than for non-minorities.

Pallais argues that the value of applying to a given college is the probability that the student attends the college times the student's expected utility from attending minus the application cost. Thus, students may be deterred from applying to selective schools because they believe they're unlikely to be admitted, even though their expected utility from attending would be high. A policy that induces students to apply to more colleges could encourage them to send applications with lower marginal benefits, including applications to more selective colleges. In fact, an exogenous decrease in the cost of sending ACT-score reports to colleges had exactly this effect. Students who took the ACT before the fall of 1997 were entitled to...