A new paper by Richard M. Kessler Professor of Economic Studies and Director of Asian Studies Yang Song, coauthored with Le Kang and Li Chen, examines how access to information affects students’ college application strategies and admission outcomes. The paper, “Information Access and College Admission Outcomes,” is forthcoming in the Journal of Public Economics.
The paper exploits a quasi-experiment in China’s Inner Mongolia province, where college applicants are grouped into batches with staggered application deadlines, creating a sharp difference in how much students know about which colleges are within reach. Students with greater access to information apply more ambitiously and are admitted to substantially more selective colleges — with stronger peers, more desirable locations, and higher graduate salaries — even though they have slightly lower entrance-exam scores.