| Daniel Klasik
Stanford University
Steps to College Enrollment and the Effect of the Common Application on Student College Enrollment Behavior
This study examines students' progress through steps to college enrollment and the effects of altering factors that affect completion of those steps on college enrollment outcomes. The many steps to college enrollment present a series of obstacles for students wishing to earn a college degree. Policies and programs, like the Common Application, that lower costs associated with completing these steps have received little scholarly attention, and thus their impact on student college enrollment behavior is poorly understood. Increased use of the Common Application has the potential to affect whether and where students choose to apply to college as well as the effort they spend researching colleges, which affects the quality of the student-college match (and thus likelihood of persistence) with the institution at which a student enrolls. The proposed dissertation first uses data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002) to describe how students from different backgrounds navigate steps to college enrollment such as attaining minimal college qualifications, taking standardized tests, and completing college and financial aid applications. The second part of the dissertation combines National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88), ELS:2002, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and data provided by the Common Application to examine how the increasing adoption of the Common Application by postsecondary institutions affects students' college enrollment choices. I use instrumental variables and a differencein- difference design to determine whether the availability of the Common Application increases the total number of application students submit and whether using the Common Application affects students' college persistence.
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