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Social identity as a determinant of college enrollment

This paper combines ideas from several branches of the social sciences into an economic model of college enrollment, following recent theoretical work by Akerlof and Kranton (2002). Basic to the model are notions of ‘fitting in,’ social status, and investments in human capital during high school. After using the NELS data and maximum likelihood estimation to uncover the behavioral parameters of the model, I predict the effects of ‘economic’ and ‘social’ policy interventions. I find that policies implemented during high school are often too late to reduce disparities in college enrollments; the exceptions are policies that shape adolescents’ social environments.