Estimating the responsiveness of college applications to the likelihood of acceptance and financial assistance: Evidence from Texas

This paper investigates the impact of Texas’s Top Ten Percent Rule—which grants automatic to any public college in Texas for Texas high school graduates who graduate in the top decile—and subsequent targeted recruitment programs initiated by Texas’s flagship universities. Using data on SAT test-takers in Texas from 1996 to 2004, we find that the Top Ten Percent Rule affects the set of colleges that students consider, and the targeted recruitment programs are able to attract the attention of students from poor high schools that were not traditional sources of students for the flagships in Texas.