What students believe, what they choose, and what it costs them

Proyecto 3E is a long-running research agenda on access to higher education in Chile. The project links three decades of centralized college-admissions records to administrative tax and student-loan data, to high-school records, and to large-scale surveys of applicants' beliefs about future earnings and costs. The combined database follows fifteen cohorts of Chilean high-school graduates as they apply, enroll, switch majors, take out federal loans, drop out or graduate, and enter the labor market.

A central thread is information: what do students believe about the costs and labor-market returns of different careers and institutions, where do those beliefs come from, and how does providing better information change the choices students make? A second thread is policy design: what happens when student loan availability is tied to past graduates' earnings, and what are the equilibrium effects on programs and institutions?

Selected work

• Are some degrees worth more than others? Evidence from college admission cutoffs in Chile — Hastings, Neilson & Zimmerman, NBER WP 19241 (2014). Returns to college major and selectivity in Chile, identified from hundreds of regression discontinuities at the centralized assignment cutoffs.
• (Un)informed College and Major Choice: Evidence from Linked Survey and Administrative Data — Hastings, Neilson, Ramirez & Zimmerman, Economics of Education Review (2016). How students form (often biased) beliefs about earnings and costs, and how those beliefs predict matriculation, major choice, and dropout.
• The Effects of Earnings Disclosure on College Enrollment Decisions — Hastings, Neilson & Zimmerman, NBER WP 21300 (2015). An RCT embedded in the Chilean federal student loan application provides past-graduate earnings information and shifts low-SES students toward higher-net-earnings degrees.
• Connecting Student Loans to Labor Market Outcomes: Policy Lessons from Chile — Beyer, Hastings, Neilson & Zimmerman, AER: Papers & Proceedings (2015). Loan-availability caps tied to past earnings and their effect on student and institutional incentives.
• Student Choices and the Return to College Major and Selectivity — Hastings, Neilson, Schulze & Zimmerman (working paper). A unified regression-discontinuity framework using three decades of ranked applications and a decade of administrative tax data to study how college and major choice affect life-cycle earnings.

• Location: Chile
• Partners: Ministerio de Educación, Chile
  DEMRE
  Servicio de Impuestos Internos
• Date: 2010–present
• Principal Investigators:

  Justine Hastings

  Seth Zimmerman

  Christopher Neilson

• Themes: Higher education access · Information frictions · Student loans · Returns to schooling