Early Admission at Selective Colleges

Early admissions is widely used by selective colleges and universities. We identify some basic facts about early admissions policies, including the admissions advantage enjoyed by early applicants and patterns in application behavior, and propose a game theoretic model that matches these facts. The key feature of the model is that colleges want to admit students who are enthusiastic about attending, and early admissions programs give students an opportunity to signal this enthusiasm.Game Theory, Early Admission, Education

Do and Should Financial Aid Packages Affect Students' College Choices?

Every year, thousands of high school seniors with high college aptitude face complicated menus' of scholarship and aid packages designed to affect their college choices. Using an original survey designed for this paper, we investigate whether students respond to their menus' like rational human capital investors. Whether they make the investments efficiently is important not only because they are the equivalent of the Fortune 500' for human capital, but also because they are likely to be the most analytic and long-sighted student investors. We find that the typical high aptitude student chooses his college and responds to aid in a manner that is broadly consistent with rational investment. However, we also find some serious anomalies: excessive response to loans and work-study, strong response to superficial aspects of a grant (such as whether it has a name), and response to a grant's share of college costs rather than its amount. Approximately 30 percent of high aptitude students respond to aid in a way that apparently reduces their lifetime present value. While both a lack of sophistication/information and credit constraints can explain the behavior of this 30 percent of students, the weight of the evidence favors a lack of sophistication.

A Revealed Preference Ranking of U.S. Colleges and Universities

We show how to construct a ranking of U.S. undergraduate programs based on students' revealed preferences. We construct examples of national and regional rankings, using hand-collected data on 3,240 high- achieving students. Our statistical model extends models used for ranking players in tournaments, such as chess or tennis. When a student makes his matriculation decision among colleges that have admitted him, he chooses which college "wins" in head-to-head competition. The model exploits the information contained in thousands of these wins and losses. Our method produces a ranking that would be difficult for a college to manipulate. In contrast, it is easy to manipulate the matriculation rate and the admission rate, which are the common measures of preference that receive substantial weight in highly publicized college rating systems. If our ranking were used in place of these measures, the pressure on colleges to practice strategic admissions would be relieved.

Water and Power: Agricultural Intensification in Windward North Kohala, Hawai\u27i Island

This thesis examines the processes of agricultural intensification in the eastern gulch region of windward North Kohala district, Hawai`i Island. The intensification of agricultural production was essential for Hawai`i\u27s transition from a collection of loose tribelets into an archaic state. To meet the growing demands of social paramounts, ancient farmers in North Kohala innovated novel technologies to improve their capacity to produce surpluses. In windward North Kohala, the chief innovation was intricate irrigation systems that transferred water from the region\u27s gulch beds to the adjacent elevated tablelands, first identified by the Hawai`i Archaeological Research Project in 2008 and further explored in 2009. This technology, along with developments in leeward Kohala, appears to have emerged just prior to the period of contact, during a period of agricultural expansion and intensification, between1400 A.D. and 1650 A.D. Political ecology provides a framework for the analysis of agricultural innovations and their impact on Hawaiian society. Geographic information systems were applied in order to build a model to describe the potential for agricultural land use in the eastern gulch region. Initial results suggest that large portions of the windward tablelands could have been dedicated to agricultural production, based on the landform and proximity to flowing water

The New Market for Federal Judicial Law Clerks

In the past, judges have often hired applicants for judicial clerkships as early as the beginning of the second year of law school for positions commencing approximately two years down the road. In the new hiring regime for federal judicial law clerks, by contrast, judges are exhorted to follow a set of start dates for considering and hiring applicants during the fall of the third year of law school. Using the same general methodology as we employed in a study of the market for federal judicial law clerks conducted in 1998-2000, we have broadly surveyed both federal appellate judges and law students about their experiences of the new market for law clerks. This paper analyzes our findings within the prevailing economic framework for studying markets with tendencies toward "early" hiring. Our data make clear that the movement of the clerkship market back to the third year of law school is highly valued by judges, but we also find that a strong majority of the judges responding to our surveys has concluded that nonadherence to the specified start dates is very substantial -- a conclusion we are able to corroborate with specific quantitative data from both judge and student surveys. The consistent experience of a wide range of other markets suggests that such nonadherence in the law clerk market will lead to either a reversion to very early hiring or the use of a centralized matching system such as that used for medical residencies. We suggest, however, potential avenues by which the clerkship market could stabilize at something like its present pattern of mixed adherence and nonadherence, thereby avoiding the complete abandonment of the current system.

Cost Should Be No Barrier: An Evaluation of the First Year of Harvard\u27s Financial Aid Initiative

This paper evaluates the first year of Harvard’s Financial Aid Initiative, which increased aid and recruiting for students from low income backgrounds. Using rich data from the Census and administrative sources, we estimate family incomes for the vast majority of plausible applicants from the U.S. We find that the Initiative had a significant effect almost entirely because it attracted a pool of applicants that was larger and slightly poorer. It appears that very similar standards of admission were used for this group as had been used in previous years. This group, once admitted, enrolled at a rate very similar to that of previous years. Thus, there are a greater number of low income students in the Class of 2009 than in the Class of 2008 simply because more well-qualified, low income students applied. Put another way, the initiative did not create a new form of affirmative action–rather, there was an untapped supply of able, low income students. Many apparently qualified students still do not apply, and a disproportionate share of these “missing applicants” come from high schools that have little or no tradition of sending applications to selective private colleges. Targeted outreach to such “one offs” – that is, students who are one of only a few qualified students from their school in recent years – may be a way for selective private colleges to increase their income diversity

The CAPS Prediction System and Stock Market Returns

We analyze the informational content of more than 1.2 million stock picks provided by more than 60,000 individuals from November 1, 2006 to October 31, 2007 on the CAPS open access website created by the Motley Fool company (www.caps.fool.com). On average, an individual pick in CAPS outperformed the S&P 500 index by 4 percentage points in the twelve months after the pick. We use a four-factor regression framework to estimate the excess returns associated with portfolios that aggregate these picks; a portfolio of the most popular CAPS stocks yielded excess returns of more than 18 percentage points annually relative to the portfolio of the least popular stocks

Cost Should Be No Barrier: An Evaluation of the First Year of Harvard's Financial Aid Initiative

This paper evaluates the first year of Harvard's Financial Aid Initiative, which increased aid and recruiting for students from low income backgrounds. Using rich data from the Census and administrative sources, we estimate family incomes for the vast major of plausible applicants from the U.S. We find that the Initiative had a significant effect almost entirely because it attracted a pool of applicants that was larger and slightly poorer. It appears that very similar standards of admission were used for this group as had been used in previous years. This group, once admitted, enrolled at a rate very similar to that of previous years. Thus, there are a greater number of low income students in the Class of 2009 than in the Class of 2008 simply because more well-qualified, low income students applied. Many apparently qualified students still do not apply, and many of these "missing applicants" come from high schools that have little or no tradition of sending applications to selective private colleges. Targeted outreach to such "one offs" -- that is, students who are one of only a few qualified students from their school in recent years -- may be a way for selective private colleges to increase their income diversity.