Selling College: The Effects of Advertising on Enrollment at Less-Selective Institutions (Poster 21)

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

In the last decade, U.S. colleges—mostly for-profit schools—have spent as much as $2.2 billion annually on advertising, but little is known about how college advertising impacts individuals’ enrollment decisions. On the one hand, college advertising may close gaps in individuals’ awareness and information about college opportunities, benefits, and costs, which are common among low-income and first-generation individuals. On the other hand, college advertising may exploit these information gaps using misleading or deceptive content, which can lead to costly enrollment mistakes. In this project, I examine how TV advertising affects enrollment at less-selective colleges. To identify the impacts of advertising on demand, I adopt a novel strategy that exploits exogenous variation in the realized impressions, or views, of TV ads. This approach allows me to estimate causal impacts of colleges’ own advertising, as well as that of competitors, on new undergraduate enrollments. I implement this strategy using a new dataset of college advertising, which I create by linking ad-level data to annual data on U.S. colleges for 2010-2015. In addition to estimating overall effects, I conduct heterogeneity analyses to investigate the patterns of advertising-induced enrollment substitution across different types of institutions and programs. I also examine differences by sex and race.

Author

• Elise Marifian, University of Wisconsin - Madison