Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Selling College: The Effect of Advertising on Enrollment Choices and Student Outcomes

经济学博士论文研究：推销大学：广告对入学选择和学生成绩的影响

• 批准号: 2149221
• 负责人: Jeffrey Smith
• 金额: $ 1.56万
• 依托单位: University of Wisconsin-Madison
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-04-15 至 2024-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2149221&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Economics; Selling

A college education can be a vehicle for economic opportunity and social mobility, but prospective students with less educated parents or lower-income backgrounds often lack information about available college options and their benefits and costs. Given this, and the complexity of the higher education market, it comes as little surprise that U.S. colleges—mostly for-profit schools—have spent as much as $1.65 billion annually on advertisements in recent years. Despite the proliferation of college ads, little is known about how advertising impacts enrollment choices, and whether it remedies gaps in awareness and information, which may improve individuals’ postsecondary choices and degree attainment, or exploits the gaps using misleading or deceptive content, which may lead to costly enrollment mistakes and widen socioeconomic gaps in college completion. This project will investigate how college TV advertising affects enrollment at less-selective postsecondary institutions. The researchers will use several large datasets and state-of-the-art methods to estimate the effects of college advertising on individuals’ enrollment choices, degree completion, and earnings. The questions studied and knowledge generated in this project are relevant to issues of college access and equity, as groups historically excluded from U.S. higher education are more likely to be targeted and influenced by college advertisements. The findings from this research will provide empirical evidence to inform policy conversations about college advertising, pricing, and accountability.This project studies how college advertising impacts individuals’ tertiary enrollment decisions, degree completion, and post-college earnings. The first part of the project will examine how TV advertising affects demand for college. The PIs will estimate causal impacts of colleges’ own advertising, and that of competitors, on new undergraduate enrollments, and will analyze the patterns of advertising-induced enrollment substitution across different types of colleges. To identify the impacts of advertising on demand, the PIs will use a novel strategy that exploits exogenous variation in the realized impressions, or views, of TV ads. The PIs will implement the research design using a new dataset on college advertising, created by linking ad-level data to annual institution-level data on U.S. colleges. The second part of the project will study how college advertising impacts students’ educational and labor market outcomes. The PIs will combine advertising data with a longitudinal administrative database from one large state containing education and wage data of high school graduates. A border strategy will be used to identify and estimate the impact of advertising on college persistence, degree completion, and wages. Results from the first part of the project will show the extent to which colleges’ own TV advertising generates new enrollments and whether competitors’ ads reduce enrollments or generate positive enrollment spillovers. The results from the second part will reveal if individuals’ educational and earnings outcomes are improved or worsened by college ads, which will provide suggestive evidence of whether college advertising is informative, deceptive, or both.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

大学教育可以是经济机会和社会流动性的工具，但是受过教育较低的父母或低收入背景的准学生通常缺乏有关可用大学选择及其收益和成本的信息。鉴于此，以及高等教育市场的复杂性，近年来，美国大学（主要是营利性学校）每年在广告上花费了16.5亿美元，这一点不足为奇。尽管大学广告扩大，但对广告如何影响入学选择以及它是否在意识和信息方面的补救差距很少了解，这可能会改善个人的高等教育选择和学位尝试，还是使用误导性或欺骗性内容来探索差距，这可能会导致成本的入学误差和社交社会经济学的差距。该项目将调查大学电视广告如何影响较少专上机构的入学率。研究人员将使用几种大型数据集和最先进的方法来估计大学广告对个人入学选择，学位完成和收入的影响。该项目中研究的问题和知识与大学访问和公平问题有关，因为从历史上看，美国高等教育的群体更有可能受到大学广告的目标和影响。这项研究的发现将提供经验证据，以告知有关大学广告，定价和问责制的政策对话。该项目研究大学广告如何影响个人的第三级入学决策，学位完成和大学后的收入。该项目的第一部分将研究电视广告如何影响对大学的需求。 PI将估计大学自己的广告以及竞争对手的因果影响，对新的本科入学人数，并将分析广告诱导的招生替代的模式。为了确定广告对需求的影响，PI将使用一种新颖的策略，以利用电视广告的实现印象或观点中的外源性变化。 PI将使用有关大学广告的新数据集实施研究设计，该数据集将广告级数据与美国大学的年度机构级数据联系起来而创建。该项目的第二部分将研究大学广告如何影响学生的教育和劳动力市场成果。 PI将将广告数据与一个纵向行政数据库结合起来，该数据库包含一个高中毕业生的教育和工资数据。边境战略将用于识别和估计广告对大学持久性，学位完成和工资的影响。该项目第一部分的结果将显示大学自己的电视广告产生新的入学率，以及竞争对手的广告是否减少入学率或产生积极的入学人数。第二部分的结果将揭示个人的教育和收入成果是否得到了大学广告的改善或危害，这将提供暗示性的证据，表明大学广告是否具有信息，欺骗性或两者。这项奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并通过评估该基金会的智力功能和广泛的影响来评估NSF的法定任务，并认为值得通过评估。