High profile scandals like this winter's admissions debacle can make colleges less attractive for high school students, but the damage is limited and the duration short-lived, says new research co-authored by a Georgia State University economist.
Assistant Professor Jonathan Smith and a co-author from Canada found that media coverage involving a scandal at a prestigious university augurs as much as a 10% drop in applications the following year, a decline that can last two years.
It’s the equivalent of falling 10 places in well-known rankings, such as the one by U.S. News & World Report, said Smith, in Georgia State’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies.
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In an article published in March in the journal "Contemporary Economic Policy," Smith and partner Patrick Rooney of the University of Toronto report on data they assembled for 100 top-ranked universities from 2001 to 2013. Scandals affected more than 75 percent of them.
Although the scandals appeared to suppress applications, they had no effect on the caliber of applicants as judged by SAT scores. They also did not affect the percent of applicants who decided to attend after being admitted (the term among admissions officers is “yield”). And they did not change alumni giving.
“While the overall impact of these scandals seems to be small across most outcomes, it’s important to note that a reduction of 10 percent in a college’s applications is quite large in magnitude,” Smith said in a statement issued Georgia State.
So the pain is limited, but Smith and Rooney still found a “small but suggestive” effect on deterring future scandals.
