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THE IMPACT OF HIGHLY PUBLICIZED CAMPUS SCANDALS ON COLLEGE OUTCOMES
Author(s) -
Rooney Patrick,
Smith Jonathan
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
contemporary economic policy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.454
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1465-7287
pISSN - 1074-3529
DOI - 10.1111/coep.12427
Subject(s) - media coverage , yield (engineering) , construct (python library) , economics , demographic economics , political science , business , sociology , media studies , materials science , computer science , metallurgy , programming language
Recently, many high‐profile scandals have occurred on college campuses. How might scandals affect colleges' outcomes? To investigate, we construct a dataset of scandals at the top 100 U.S. universities from 2001 to 2013. We find that scandals with significant media coverage substantially reduce applications. For example, a scandal covered in a long‐form news article leads to a 10% drop in applications the following year‐roughly the same impact of dropping ten spots in prominent college rankings. This impact persists for 2 years. We find no impact on incoming student body competitiveness, yield, or alumni donations, and little effect on deterring future scandals. ( JEL L82, I23, D83)