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Why it's harder than before to get into your favorite college
Caroline Hoxby reports:
This paper shows that although the top ten percent of colleges are substantially more selective now than they were 5 decades ago, most colleges are not more selective. Moreover, at least 50 percent of colleges are substantially less selective now than they were then. This paper demonstrates that competition for space--the number of students who wish to attend college growing faster than the number of spaces available--does not explain changing selectivity. The explanation is, instead, that the elasticity of a student's preference for a college with respect to its proximity to his home has fallen substantially over time and there has been a corresponding increase in the elasticity of his preference for a college with respect to its resources and peers. In other words, students used to attend a local college regardless of their abilities and its characteristics. Now, their choices are driven far less by distance and far more by a college's resources and student body. It is the consequent re-sorting of students among colleges that has, at once, caused selectivity to rise in a small number of colleges while simultaneously causing it to fall in other colleges. I show that the integration of the market for college education has had profound implications on the peers whom college students experience, the resources invested in their education, the tuition they pay, and the subsidies they enjoy. An important finding is that, even though tuition has been rising rapidly at the most selective schools, the deal students get there has arguably improved greatly. The result is that the "stakes" associated with admission to these colleges are much higher now than in the past.
Here is one summary of the paper. The ungated version is here. Note that the incomplete nature of globalization for higher ed means this process still has a long way to run.
By the way, does this logic also apply to romance? To really good sporting events? To meeting and befriending celebrities? Is this a more general prediction in a superstars model?
Posted by Tyler Cowen on November 7, 2009 at 07:30 AM in Education | Permalink
Comments
The answer to all of your questions is yes. As communication costs fall, you get economies of scale in prestige but like all good things this effect won't last forever.
Posted by: sa at Nov 7, 2009 7:46:33 AM
...and to housing markets?
Posted by: Carsten Valgreen at Nov 7, 2009 8:10:09 AM
The paper discusses American colleges only ("The Changing Selectivity of American Colleges"). Different factors may (I suspect are) at work in other countries.
Posted by: tom s. at Nov 7, 2009 8:16:38 AM
I think a large factor has been the huge money to be made in the financial industry over the last 20 yrs, and the concentrated recruiting by financial firms at just a few colleges.
Posted by: Mesa at Nov 7, 2009 8:45:34 AM
I think we all know what's caused this - U.S. News and World Report.
Posted by: Ted Craig at Nov 7, 2009 9:14:51 AM
tom s. misses Tyler's point. A very small but growing fraction of students abroad are targeting the top U.S. schools as their first choice. There are even high schools in Korea and elsewhere whose main purpose is to get students into selective U.S. institutions. As the world gets richer, more foreign students will want to attend the world's elite schools, a disproportionate number of which are in the U.S. This will only change if more foreign schools become elite (from the world's point of view, not in the domestic market) and if they teach in English. The latter rules out many strong universities from marketing to the world.
Posted by: jorge at Nov 7, 2009 9:18:03 AM
Interesting. Would out-of-state tuition costs be a factor in why the change has had less impact on state universities than the independents?
And how does the study address the question as to whether status competition related to attending a top 50 school (yes, the US News effect) isn't overcoming the proximity factor rather than the other way around (i.e., that the weakening of the proximity factor encourages students to apply to top 50s)?
Posted by: Strick at Nov 7, 2009 12:22:41 PM
elite colleges have kept enrollment low.
non-elites have become enormous, especially the state universities.
Posted by: endessous at Nov 7, 2009 1:16:40 PM
Ted Craig hit it spot on. US News and World Reports college rankings puts weight on the selectivity number. Schools will do anything to up that number, as it pushes their ranking.
Posted by: Jim B at Nov 7, 2009 2:17:09 PM
If you are a very good student and get into Princeton and your family income is under $100k, you will spend less to attend Princteon than almost any public college in the US.
Today, it is very easy to get information about any American college and it is very easy to apply to many colleges. My youngest last year applied to 10 schools including 2 Ivies, 3 other privates, and the balance public, 4 of which were in state. Many of his friends applied to between 12 and 15 schools.
The attitude among the kids and the counselors was if you were willing to spend the $60 per school app fee and put in the time on each app, you will only apply for undergrad once so you should apply to your dream schools as well as safe schools and the more the merrier.
When I was applying to schools in the 1970s from the midwest, even the brightest kids (Natl Merit types) attended state schools. Very few went out of state. And most only applied to one or two schools.
Posted by: anon at Nov 7, 2009 2:33:05 PM
The range in SAT scores between the 25th and 75th percentiles at most colleges is now fairly narrow as students and colleges increasingly stratify on the IQ pyramid.
One exception is Brigham Young University, which is attended both by very smart and very average Mormons. BYU keeps tuition quite low (in part by having large class sizes) so most Mormons can afford it. It's interesting how the the very Republican Mormons have become an island of egalitarianism within an increasingly elitist society, while the very Democratic Ivy League colleges are the shock troops of social stratification.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Nov 7, 2009 3:36:11 PM
My experience is that going far away from home for college isn't all that it's cracked up to be. If you are from the Northeast corner of the country, don't worry about it, but for kids from the rest of the country, it's important to think about where you might want to live after college. Ideally, you will want to keep your college friends as the core of your post-college social network (it gets harder to make friends as you get older). But if you find yourself homesick for where you grew up (as is not uncommon to young people, who generally imprint on the landscape they lived in at puberty), you may wind up back home with your college friends thousands of miles away. In that case you would have been better off having gone to college closer to home.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Nov 7, 2009 3:46:01 PM
The first chapter of The Bell Curve describes the process by which, say, Harvard went from being a school for smart Bostonians to being a school for the smartest people from across the country. They see the inflection point as the 1950s.
For example, my wife's uncle, the son of a West Side of Chicago ditchdigger, won a scholarship to MIT in 1952. A Chicago newspaper ran a picture of him getting on the train to Boston, suggesting that this was both still unusual at the time but starting to be an exciting trend that readers were interested in.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Nov 7, 2009 4:23:31 PM
Way to be a downer on my dreams of attending Harvard (or Princeton, or MIT), Tyler.
Posted by: Neal at Nov 7, 2009 7:33:20 PM
This rings true to me. When I see what the typical student as like now at the college I attended 20 years ago, I doubt I* would get admitted now.
* - meaning my 1986 self
Posted by: mobile at Nov 7, 2009 10:40:20 PM
Perhaps it has something to do with each school's political agenda. If you are not politically in vogue, you pay a tax while others get a credit.
Posted by: jorod at Nov 8, 2009 6:07:43 PM
> Is this a more general prediction in a superstars model?
i just tested this for Hollywood and the intensity of sorting doesn't seem to be increasing in that field
Posted by: Gabriel Rossman at Nov 8, 2009 6:31:12 PM
"The first chapter of The Bell Curve describes the process by which, say, Harvard went from being a school for smart Bostonians to being a school for the smartest people from across the country."
No, no, no! Harvard is not the school for the "smartest" people from across the country. Just as Goldman Sachs, believe it or not, does not employ the "smartest" people in the world. Harvard has some smart people and maybe even some - but only some - very smart people (just like Goldman Sachs), but not even close to all.
Posted by: Anon at Nov 9, 2009 8:42:20 AM
"Does this logic also apply to romance?"
It might apply. Some people might not restrict themselves to dating within the same city, or even the same country. A person might decide that pursuing overseas opportunities would allow him to find a more appealing spouse.
I think that has already happened to some extent with the rise of Internet-dating services that specialize in international dating and marriage. People wouldn't sign up for these services if they didn't think they could improve their dating/marriage prospects by doing so.
I would be fascinated to see some research on the matches produced by these services (of the sort Dan Ariely and two co-authors did using Match.com's data).
Posted by: Larry at Nov 9, 2009 1:35:28 PM
It's not just the selective colleges:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091027/ts_alt_afp/lifestylegermanyuspeoplemediahealthfashion_20091027151756
Posted by: mobile at Nov 9, 2009 9:56:12 PM
