Can Educational Policies Affect Student Choices through Increasing Information, Peer Influences, or Both?

Jason Fletcher, Yale University

This research examines the extent to which college decisions among adolescents depend on the decisions of their peers by exploiting two unique features of the Texas Higher Education Opportunity Project (THEOP) data in order to identify the mechanism through which peer social interactions operate: student-reported preferences for specific colleges and student-reported information channels about college. These results have implications for broad types of policy interventions to increase college enrollment among disadvantaged groups.