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

大学教育可以成为获得经济机会和社会流动性的工具，但父母受教育程度较低或收入背景较低的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，近年来，美国大学（主要是营利性学校）每年在广告上的花费高达16.5亿美元，也就不足为奇了。尽管大学广告激增，但人们对广告如何影响招生选择知之甚少，以及它是否弥补了意识和信息上的差距，这可能会改善个人的高等教育选择和学位获得，或者利用误导性或欺骗性的内容来利用差距，这可能会导致代价高昂的招生错误，并扩大大学毕业时的社会经济差距。这个项目将调查大学电视广告是如何影响非选择性高等教育机构的招生的。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。本项目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。这项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经验证据。本项目研究大学广告如何影响个人的高等教育入学决定、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大学需求。pi将评估大学自身广告和竞争对手广告对新本科生入学人数的因果影响，并将分析不同类型大学广告诱导的入学替代模式。为了确定广告对需求的影响，pi将采用一种新颖的策略，利用电视广告的已实现印象或观点的外生变化。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结果。pi将把广告数据与一个大州的纵向管理数据库结合起来，该数据库包含高中毕业生的教育和工资数据。边界策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在多大程度上吸引了新的入学人数，以及竞争对手的广告是减少了入学人数还是产生了积极的入学溢出效应。第二部分的结果将揭示个人的教育和收入结果是由大学广告改善还是恶化，这将为大学广告是信息性的，欺骗性的，还是两者兼而有之提供启发性证据。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.