College as a Marriage Market

By comparing the outcomes of applicants like these – with the same preferred pro- gram and application scores just below and above the program’s admission cutoff – we can estimate the effect of crossing the admission threshold to the preferred program. [...] The background variables are based on information about parental education (both for the mother and father), income of the father, and the immigrant status of the family. [...] Using this rescaled measure the absence of assortativity corresponds to R = 0 , and the maximum positive level of assortativity that is attainable given the distribution of education on the two sides of the market is denoted by R = 1. [...] The data is normalized so that zero on the x-axis represents the admission cutoff to the preferred field, and observations to the left (right) of this cutoff have therefore an application score that is lower (higher) than the cutoff. [...] Since the estimated effects on homogamy are nearly identical to those for matching with someone with a degree in the program, we focus, in the remainder of the paper, on the homogamy estimates, which are easier to interpret.