We estimate the impact of one of the largest college-to-student outreach efforts in the nation, the College Board's Student Search Service. In an oversubscribed “order,” colleges receive contact information of a randomly chosen subset of PSAT and SAT exam takers who opt into the service and meet colleges’ search criteria from a larger set of students with identical backgrounds. We find that students who receive outreach enabled by Student Search Service (“licensed”) are 23 percent (0.1 percentage point) more likely to apply to the licensing college than students with similar backgrounds who did not receive outreach. Nearly 20 percent of students induced to apply to a college because of the Student Search Service also enroll, increasing the probability of enrolling in the college that licensed their contact information by 22 percent (0.02 percentage point). These impacts are twice as large for traditionally underserved students. Responsiveness to college outreach is larger for racial/ethnic minorities, first-generation students, and low- and moderate-income students. Despite the fact that one additional license changes the specific institution to which students send scores and enroll, we cannot detect changes to the broad types of colleges in which students ultimately enroll.

To demonstrate the sequential nature of the college application process, in this paper I analyze the evolution of applications among high-achieving low-income students through data on the exact timing of SAT score sends. I describe at what point students send scores to colleges and which score sends ultimately become applications, resulting in three main points. First, score sends are not synonymous with applications—rather, only 62 percent of score sends in this sample turn into applications. Second, the conversion from score send to application is nonrandom as it relates to college characteristics: Score sends are more likely to convert into applications when they are to colleges with lower tuition, higher graduation rates, and relatively near a student's home. Third, the timing of score sends is related to the probability of its becoming an application, whereby score sends sent relatively early are least likely to become applications. These facts imply that there is room for improvement when modeling the application process and, in addition, the timing of an intervention or policy may be critical to its success.

Students starting at a two-year college are much less likely to graduate than similar students who start at a four-year college, but the sources of this attainment gap are largely unexplained. This paper investigates the attainment consequences of sector choice and peer quality among recent high school graduates. Using data on all Preliminary SAT (PSAT) test-takers between 2004 and 2006, we develop a novel measure of peer ability for most two-year and four-year colleges in the United States—the average PSAT of enrolled students. We document substantial variation in this measure of peer quality across two-year colleges and nontrivial overlap between the two-year and four-year sectors. We find that half the gap in bachelor's degree attainment rates across sectors is explained by differences in peers, leaving room for structural barriers to transferring between institutions to also play an important role.