Economics Applied Micro Seminar - Eduard Boehm (LSE)

Thursday, 22 October 2026 at 13:30

College Discretion in Admissions and Student Achievement

Event details

Abstract: This paper studies how much discretion colleges should have in admissions. We exploit two features of Chile’s centralized college admissions system: programs’ admission rules are publicly observed, and the assignment mechanism is known. We leverage a reform that expanded programs’ discretion by giving them the option to increase emphasis on within-high school rank in admissions. Programs used this discretion very differently: although most could have increased diversity in socioeconomic and gender enrollment, many chose not to. We estimate a model of students’ application choices and graduation outcomes that decomposes graduation into selection and heterogeneous causal effects, and we recover programs’ preferences over student composition from their observed rule choices. Student–program match explains 23 percent of the variance in predicted graduation, and both students and programs select on it in their applications and admission rules. Mirroring the descriptive evidence, programs differ widely in how much they value match and socioeconomic diversity. Chile’s limited discretion performs well against alternatives: test-only admissions and lotteries reduce access or graduation, while full discretion increases segregation.

Organiser

University of Exeter Business School - Economics

Location

Syndicate Room B