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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]We show that under the identification assumption that different college  admission committees’ assessments of a candidate’s underlying merit (i.e., the component that predicts long-term outcomes) are positively correlated with each other, comparisons of students who are admitted vs. rejected from the waitlist can be used to identify the causal effect of admission for marginal applicants.

Using this design, we find that being admitted from the waitlist to an Ivy-Plus college increases students’ chances of achieving early career upper-tail success on both monetary and non-monetary dimensions. The causal effects of admission to an Ivy-Plus college are much larger for students with weaker fallback options– e.g., whose colleges in their home state channel fewer students to the top 1% after college. Exploiting this heterogeneity in treatment effects, we estimate that the marginal student who is admitted to and attends an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average flagship public is about 50% more likely to reach the top 1% of the income distribution at age 33, nearly twice as likely to attend a highly-ranked graduate school, and 2.5 times as likely to work at a prestigious firm.[/quote]

Seems like the assumptions about admission from the waitlist are not warranted. Most waitlists are need-aware. Generally, waitlist acceptance is related to institutional priorities. I think they are reading way too much into that.

--my kid was admitted to an Ivy-Plus off the waitlist this year. full pay, high stats. Was not admitted off the waitlist at other, lower-ranked schools. Not being admitted off the waitlist at the other schools does not imply anything about the merit of his app.

They are trying to do too much in this "study".

[quote]College-Specific Analysis Sample. When studying admissions and matriculation at specific colleges Section 3.2), admissions decisions (Section 3.3), and the causal effects of colleges on outcomes (Section 4), we focus on the subset of Ivy-Plus and flagship public colleges for which we have internal application and admissions data. In these analyses, we define the analysis sample as all permanent residents or citizens in the  college-specific dataset who submitted a first-year undergraduate application to the college over the years for which we have data who (1) can be linked to the tax data based on their SSNs or ITINs and (2) can be linked to parents in the tax data.[/quote]
Full pay students often do not include SSNs in the application because they are not applying for need-based aid. My kids did not.[/quote]

The data come from 1098-T forms that colleges submit for all tuition paying students. For non-tuition paying students, it’s complemented by Pell Grant data. Read before you criticize. [/quote]
DP. Curious. 1098-T forms are only for enrolled students. Students who applied, but did not attend, would not have their income included.

How does having a 1098-T form tell the researchers what the student's income level is? What are the mechanics by which personal income data is available to researchers, and should it be, both for those who receive need-based aid and for students who didn't submit financial aid forms? The university does not have a family's financial information for those who didn't apply for aid.[/quote]

“We obtain data on children's and parents incomes from income tax returus (1040 forms) and third-party
information returns (e.g., W-2 forms), which contain information on the earnings of those who do not file tax returns. We measure income in 2015 dollars, adjusting for inflation using the consumer price index (CPI-U).
Parental Income. Our primary measure of parental income is total household-level pre-tax income. In
years in which a child's parent files an income tax return, we define household income as the Adjusted Gross Income reported on the 1040 tax return. In years in which a parent does not file an income tax return, we define household income as the sum of wage earnings (reported on form W-2) and unemployment benefits (reported on form 1099-G) for all parents linked to a child. In years in which parents neither file tax returns nor receive information returns, household income is coded as zero. Chetty et al. (2020) show that these income definitions yield an income distribution similar to that in the American Community Survey (ACS) under the same income definitions.”[/quote]
How do the researchers have access to the tax forms? That is my question. This is not public information, nor do colleges have it for students who did not apply for aid.

(As a separate question, do families applying for aid agree to give access to their tax information to third parties? I guess I shouldn't be surprised if they do, but that doesn't say much for privacy.)[/quote]They referenced an IRS contract.[/quote]

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