Author Abstract

In recent years, there have been a number of high profile scandals on college campuses, ranging from cheating to hazing to rape. With so much information regarding a college’s academic and nonacademic attributes available to students, how do these scandals affect their applications? To investigate, we construct a dataset of scandals at the top 100 United States universities between 2001 and 2013. Scandals with a high level of media coverage significantly reduce applications. For example, a scandal covered in a long-form news article leads to a 10 percent drop in applications the following year. This is roughly the same as the impact on applications of dropping 10 spots in the US News and World Report college rankings. Moreover, colleges react to scandals--the probability of another incident in the subsequent years falls--but this effect dissipates within five years. Combined, these results suggest important demand-side and supply-side responses to incidents with negative media coverage.

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