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.

大学教育可以成为经济机会和社会流动性的载体，但父母受教育程度较低或收入背景较低的未来学生往往缺乏有关大学选择及其收益和成本的信息。考虑到这一点，再加上高等教育市场的复杂性，美国大学--大多数是营利性学校--近年来每年在广告上的花费高达16.5亿美元就不足为奇了。尽管大学广告激增，但人们对广告如何影响入学选择知之甚少，以及它是否弥补了意识和信息的差距，这可能会改善个人的中学后选择和学位获得，或利用误导性或欺骗性内容的差距，这可能会导致昂贵的入学错误并扩大大学毕业的社会经济差距。本研究将探讨大学电视广告如何影响选择性较低的大专院校的入学率。研究人员将使用几个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。在这个项目中研究的问题和产生的知识与大学入学和公平问题有关，因为历史上被排除在美国高等教育之外的群体更有可能成为大学广告的目标和影响。本研究的结果将为有关大学广告、定价和问责制的政策对话提供实证证据。本项目研究大学广告如何影响个人的高等教育入学决策、学位完成和大学毕业后的收入。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和竞争对手的广告对新的本科生入学率的因果影响，并将分析不同类型大学的广告诱导的入学替代模式。为了确定广告对需求的影响，PI将使用一种新的策略，该策略利用电视广告的已实现印象或视图中的外生变化。PI将使用一个新的大学广告数据集来实施研究设计，该数据集是通过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的。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的结果。PI将把联合收割机广告数据与一个包含高中毕业生教育和工资数据的大型州的纵向行政数据库结合起来。边界策略将被用来识别和估计广告对大学持续性，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在多大程度上产生了新的入学率，以及竞争对手的广告是减少了入学率还是产生了积极的入学溢出效应。从第二部分的结果将揭示如果个人的教育和收入的结果是改善或恶化的大学广告，这将提供暗示性的证据，是否大学广告是信息，欺骗，或两者兼而有之。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。