Students from low socio-economic status (SES) or ethnic minority backgrounds are less likely to enrol into elite universities than high SES or White students. We use student-level university application data from the UK centralised university admissions service to show that these gaps cannot be...

We study the impact of higher education financing on the academic aspirations of teenagers and of their parents. We exploit a reform which introduced a large increase in the maximum university tuition fees and a more redistributive student loan system, both of which varied across the UK's...

Detecting racial discrimination using observational data is challenging because of the presence of unobservables that may be correlated with race. Using data made public in the SFFA v. Harvard case, we estimate discrimination in a setting where this concern is mitigated. Namely, we show that...

Over the past 20 years, elite colleges in the US have seen dramatic increases in applications. We provide context for part of this trend using detailed data on Harvard University that was unsealed as part of the SFFA v. Harvard lawsuit. We show that Harvard encourages applications from many...

The lawsuit Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard University provided an unprecedented look at how an elite school makes admissions decisions. Using publicly released reports, we examine the preferences Harvard gives for recruited athletes, legacies, those on the dean's interest list, and...