Application Matters: Cultivating an Ecological Understanding of Postsecondary Application Behavior

• In Event: Roundtable Session 20
  In Roundtable Session: Big Decisions: Choosing Postsecondary Destinations

Abstract

Exploring the relationship between postsecondary application behavior and enrollment choice is timely given that interventions are increasingly “nudging” low-income high school students toward certain types of application behavior. Missing from these interventions and the college choice literature writ large is baseline knowledge of college application behavior using a nationally-representative sample with attention to how application behavior varies across disadvantaged populations. This study, leveraging postsecondary application data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, uses nonhierarchical cluster analysis to isolate patterns of postsecondary application behavior and multinomial response models to regress clustered behavior on enrollment outcomes. We find nuanced yet meaningful variation in application behavior and hypothesize this behavior predicts enrollment outcomes in ways that have important research and policy implications.

Author

• Grant Blume, University of Washington