Student Enrollment is affected by total college cost

The greatest contribution of the micro-level studies of college choice behavior is their ability to estimate the effects of institutional and student characteristics on the probability that a particular individual will choose a particular college. Understanding the enrollment effects of such characteristics can help enrollment managers tailor and target their college’s marketing mix of programs, prices, and places to those students possessing characteristics similar to those who most often matriculate at their college. Some enrollment effects of the interaction between student and institutional characteristics are especially important to understand. For example, student responsiveness to college cost decreases as income and academic ability rise, and vice versa. Also, recent research has shown that students are now about equally sensitive to changes in the major parts of college cost: tuition, room and board, commuting, financial aid, and foregone earnings (Manski and Wise 1983).