This note looks at the quality of the information on family income that selective colleges rely on to increase equality of opportunity by recruiting high-ability, low-income students. Individual family income estimates embedded in the College Board’s search parameters are compared, for 635...

This paper was prepared as a chapter for College Decisions: How Students Actually Make Them and How They Could, edited by Caroline Hoxby for publication by the University of Chicago Press for the NBER. In this chapter, we describe the potential significance of student peer effects for the...

College tuition, as the price of higher education services, defies familiar economic analysis in important ways. It is recognized that tuition is a price that covers only a fraction of the cost of producing those educational services (about a third, nationally), creating an in-kind subsidy for...

All of the financial aid decisions at Williams College for the past fourteen years - nearly 14,000 of them - were used to see how much students actually paid for tuition, room, board, and fees to go to that highly selective and expensive school - their net prices. Williams practices need blind...

With only a small number of their students coming from families with the lowest incomes (10% from the bottom two family income quintiles), the nation's most selective private colleges and universities need to know why. Two ready ideological answers are (1) that low-income high-ability students...

With only a small number of their students coming from families with the lowest incomes (10% from the bottom two family income quintiles), the nation's most selective private colleges and universities need to know why. Two ready ideological answers are (1) that low-income high-ability students...

All of the financial aid decisions at Williams College for the past fourteen years - nearly 14,000 of them - were used to see how much students actually paid for tuition, room, board, and fees to go to that highly selective and expensive school - their net prices. Williams practices need blind...