This thesis addresses UK students’ university choice using discrete choice methods and micro-data obtained from Higher Education Statistical Agency for graduates between 2006 and 2010. The thesis consists of three chapters with each addressing a different aspect of students’ choice. The studies are intended to provide policy-makers and other decision-makers with valuable information that will help them to implement strategies and policies for better higher education. Some work in the literature has been dedicated to students’ university choice. This thesis explores this body of work and builds on it, extends it and improves what is previously known in the literature. The aim of the first chapter is to investigate what affects students’ university choice. It contributes to the literature by establishing the best method to do so. Two models are used: the standard conditional logit and conditional logit with, what is called in this paper, alternative specific constants. Conditional logit with alternative specific constants improves on conditional logit twofold: it deals with unobserved university characteristics and improves the model fit. The results show that the probability of attending a university decreases with an increase in tuition fees and distance between students’ home and the university, and decreases in students’ socio-economic status. The second chapter further investigates the importance of distance on students’ university choice and it contributes to the literature by calculating the willingness to pay of students for distance to university. The chosen models are estimated for different socio-economic group of students separately. This methodology allows for meaningful comparison between socio-economic groups and produces more reliable estimates due to the fact that it accommodates for different unobserved characteristics of universities for different groups of students. The results show that students with the highest socio-economic status are not affected or have a positive utility of distance. The willingness to pay of other socio-economic groups are mixed and depend on the university characteristics used in the model. The third chapter focuses on students’ attitudes towards costs and benefits of university degree by calculating the discount rate of future income using marginal utility of graduate income and tuition fees. In addition, the chapter shows how use of consideration sets of universities for each student improves the model fit. The results show that students have a normal discount rate around 1% without consideration sets. The discount rate becomes negative in all models apart from one, when consideration sets are used.

Counselor education program faculties evaluate applicants to masters and doctoral level programs using criteria that the faculties hope will predict the applicant's potential for academic success and then effectiveness as a counselor, counselor educator, or researcher. Choosing admission criteria to assess this level of potential in an applicant is quite a task. Those counselor education programs that are accredited by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) have the benefit of the admission guidelines provided by CACREP standards for accreditation. These guidelines give only basic, general direction to programs regarding their admission criteria but each individual program determines their own criteria for admission. The purpose of this study was to discover any recognizable trends in admission policy criteria, in terms of specific criteria used to evaluate and select students from the applicant pool, for CACREP accredited masters and doctoral programs. This study also sought to discover any recognizable trends in admission policy criteria, in terms of a specific number of criteria used to evaluate and select students for CACREP accredited master and doctoral counselor education programs. This qualitative study investigated 178 masters level CACREP accredited counselor education programs and 45 doctoral CACREP accredited counselor education programs. The CACREP Website provided contact names and Web address for each program. Admission criteria were pulled from the program Websites. If no criteria were present on the Website, the program contact person was contacted by phone or by email. A contact form for the masters level programs, and another for the doctoral level programs, was developed to record program criteria. A rate or return of 96% for the masters level programs and 91% for the doctoral programs was achieved. For the purposes of this study, a trend was defined as 1) any measure being required by 50% or more of the responding programs, or 2) the number of measures used by a program being equal to the mean number of measures used by all programs. The masters level program trends were for counselor education programs to use the following criteria to assess applicants: transcripts, grade point average (GPA), letters of reference, applications, Graduate Record Exam (GRE) scores, letters of intent, and interviews with faculty members. A trend was also discovered for masters level programs to use between 3 and 12 measures to assess applicants for admission with a mean score of 7.01, a median score of 7, and a mode of 7. The doctoral level program trends were for counselor education programs to use the following criteria to assess applicants: transcripts, letters of reference, letters of intent to address goals, aspirations, experiences, and purpose, GRE scores, applications, and GPA. A trend was also discovered for doctoral level programs to use between 4 and 10 measures to assess applicants for admission with a mean score of 8.097, a median score of 8, and a mode of 9. Given the high rate of return, the trends discovered can be said to reflect the admission criteria used to assess applicants for admission into CACREP accredited masters and doctoral counselor education programs in the United States. A limitation could be that the data was collected using different methods of communication in that some data was collected from Websites, some from email correspondence, and some data from phone conversations. It seemed that the Websites and the emails gave the admission criteria but the phone conversations gave an understanding of not only the criteria used but the process used in selecting students from the applicant pool.

Since the 1980s, selective college admissions has become increasingly competitive. In 2021, for example, Harvard admitted a record-low 3.4 percent of applicants, compared to 18 percent in 1990. Trends at selective public institutions are similar. Concurrently, the role of race in admissions has evolved, as legal challenges, from Regents of the University of California v. Bakke onward, have limited the scope of affirmative action policies. The consideration of race in admissions, once intended to repair historical racial injustices, is now justified by the educational benefits of diversity. The same Supreme Court decisions also promoted the use of holistic review in admissions. These trends have collided in the latest legal challenges to affirmative action policies, which have mobilized Asian Americans as plaintiffs, accusing highly-selective schools of discrimination. Amidst this competitive and contested landscape, the private college consulting industry has grown exponentially. One trade association estimates that the number of independent educational consultants (IECs) in the United States quintupled between 2005 and 2015. Hired primarily by middle- and upper-class families, IECs occupy a unique position. They work intensively one-on-one with students to help manage a complicated process, while also maintaining ties to schools and colleges. They therefore serve as an analytical lens for understanding how broader trends in admissions affect students on the ground. Drawing on research on culture and educational inequality, the history of race in college admissions, and moral boundary-making, I ask how IECs help clients interpret elements of holistic review; how IECs respond to perceived discrimination and questions of racial diversity; and how participants in a system viewed as unequal draw moral boundaries around their work. Through interviews with 50 IECs in New York and California, I first show that IECs’ work makes the processes by which students successfully apply to colleges explicit. In doing so, they shine a light on what I call shadow criteria, or the unstated set of criteria that underlie the official criteria by which colleges judge applicants. Authenticity is one shadow criterion that requires students to translate their existing cultural capital into an application that is attractive to admissions officers – a process that, as I will show, is subject to class-based considerations. Second, IECs view White, Asian American, and underrepresented minority (i.e., Black, Latinx, and Indigenous) students as having different concerns about racial diversity and discrimination, and advise students accordingly. However, addressing these concerns at the individual level can reinforce colleges’ racialized admissions systems and reify stereotypes. Third, the majority of respondents view the overall admissions system either as flawed, or at best with ambivalence. Respondents draw moral boundaries between themselves and bad actors in the profession, legitimating their work and justifying it morally. Through the lens of the independent educational consultant, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of how actors within the college admissions ecosystem respond to competitive pressures. It also provides a greater qualitative understanding of how the growing field of private educational consulting operates.

This dissertation addresses three separate questions in human capital and development economics. In the first chapter, I study how college admission concerns drive students' field choices in a field-specific college admission system. To study this question, I leverage a college admission policy reform in Ethiopia that sharply increased the proportion of college seats in public universities allocated to college STEM fields. The reform significantly decreased the admission selectivity of STEM fields in the short run. Using cohort analysis and a regression discontinuity design, I show that students are significantly more likely to choose the STEM fields after the reform. More importantly, I find significant heterogeneity in the field choice response, with the marginal students responding more strongly compared to the infra-marginal students. In addition, using a complier characteristics analysis, I show that the reform led to a significant sorting on field-specific skills. In particular, those induced to choose the STEM fields have a comparative advantage in skills valued more in the STEM fields. These overall and field-specific sorting significantly changed the peer quality in STEM and non-STEM fields. These findings imply that admission concerns play a significant role in students' field choices. However, students do not naively sort into less selective college fields. Instead, their choices are consistent with their relative position in the distribution of multi-dimensional skills. The latter suggests that students make more informed and rational choices than the existing literature suggests. In the second chapter, I investigate the effect of the fast expansion of the Second Generation (2G) and Third Generation (3G) mobile technologies in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) on health literacy in the region. Using Demographic and Health Surveys data from 25 countries in SSA and a historical mobile network coverage map, I estimate an Instrumental Variable (IV) specification. I show that the widespread use of these technologies has significantly improved health literacy in the region. Specifically, access to either technology significantly decreases misconceptions and wrong beliefs about diseases and health. The benefits are substantial in regions where the technologies have been available longer. Consistent with the range of services it provides, 3G technology results in a larger gain in health literacy. These findings imply that mobile technologies have considerable potential to improve health and quality of life in many developing countries. In the final chapter, I study the relationship between birth spacing and children's outcomes, focusing on the mechanisms that underlie the relationship. Using linked mother-child data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), I explore two mechanisms: the maternal health and physiology channel and the material and parental time input channel. The result shows that a short pre-birth inter-pregnancy interval negatively affects the birth endowments of children, highlighting the importance of the birth spacing effect that works through the maternal health and physiology channel. The study also provides evidence in support of the material and parental time input channel. In particular, I show that closely spaced siblings score significantly lower on the standardized Peabody International Achievement Test (PIAT), a wide-range measure of academic achievement for children aged five and above. On the other hand, I find limited evidence of the birth spacing effect on long-term outcomes such as schooling and labor market outcomes. These findings have implications for parental leave and other labor market policies affecting the birth spacing choices of parents.

The purpose of this project is to update the architecture and design of the California State University San Bernardino Graduate Advisor System. This system allows potential students into the Master of Science degree program in Computer Science to complete their application online.

Legal and scientific imperatives necessitate the validation of a psychometric battery before using it for the purposes of personnel selection and decision- making. The aim of this investigation is to validate a selection battery, i.e. the Ability, Processing of Information and Learning (APIL) Battery and Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM), used in selecting university bridging - course students. The empirical study is informed by a literature review focussing on the legal and scientific parameters of psychometrics within selection, the conceptualisation of intelligence and its relationship to academic performance. Hypotheses are posed regarding the predictive power of the selection battery and the effect of biographical factors on academic performance. Results indicate that the APU. Battery apd Raven's APM are both valid predictors of academic performance, ·although the former appears more effective. This investigation emphasises the influence of moderating factors, i.e. factors other than cognitive ability, on academic performance. / Industrial and Organisational Psychology / M. Adm. (Industrial and Organisational Psychology)

Legal and scientific imperatives necessitate the validation of a psychometric battery before using it for the purposes of personnel selection and decision- making. The aim of this investigation is to validate a selection battery, i.e. the Ability, Processing of Information and Learning (APIL) Battery and Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM), used in selecting university bridging - course students. The empirical study is informed by a literature review focussing on the legal and scientific parameters of psychometrics within selection, the conceptualisation of intelligence and its relationship to academic performance. Hypotheses are posed regarding the predictive power of the selection battery and the effect of biographical factors on academic performance. Results indicate that the APU. Battery apd Raven's APM are both valid predictors of academic performance, ·although the former appears more effective. This investigation emphasises the influence of moderating factors, i.e. factors other than cognitive ability, on academic performance. / Industrial and Organisational Psychology / M. Adm. (Industrial and Organisational Psychology)

The purpose of the project was to develop a rubric to assess whether a selected group of college websites, chosen to represent most of what is available to students, meet the requirements necessary for students to make an informed college choice. The project was undertaken as a way to determine if these sites, individually or as a whole, present enough information for students to make a choice that correctly aligns with their college aspirations.