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...

A study was conducted to see whether peer effects could be observed among undergraduates at Williams College, an elite four-year liberal arts school. Specifically, the study explored whether students in the bottom third of their class, with average SAT's of about 1300, would perform better in...

A study was conducted to examine peer effects among undergraduates at Williams College, a highly selective four-year liberal arts school. Specifically, the study explored whether students would perform better writing about newspaper articles they read and discussed in academically homogeneous or...

Two studies explored the experience and performance of students at Williams College in three-person groups that were homogeneous or heterogeneous in rated academic ability. In accord with hypotheses from Festinger’s (1954) social comparison theory, students in academically homogeneous groups...

In this paper we present estimates of roommate and institution based peer effects. Using data from the College & Beyond survey, the Freshman survey, and phonebook data that allows us to identify college roommates - we estimate models of students' political persuasion and intellectual engagement....