| When managing their enrollment, institutions of higher learning face multiple decisions that help determine the percentage of their student body that are transfer students. Because transfers differ from direct attendees in a number of characteristics, these enrollment decisions have numerous implications. This dissertation endeavors to improve our understanding of these implications as well as the factors that have influenced the composition of a school's enrollment in the past.; The first half of the dissertation examines the determinants of an institution's transfer student rate. After a discussion of the determinants one would expect given the observed differences between transfers and direct attendees, enrollment data from the College Board's Annual Survey of Colleges for the years 1984 to 1997 are analyzed to examine which factors explain the variation in enrollment across institutions. The results indicate that the transfer enrollment rate, the percentage of an institution's incoming class that are transfers, is lower at private institutions than at publics with the difference growing over the period. This disparity might be due to different "tastes" for transfers and direct attendees, as privates appear to use increases in their capacity to be selective to decrease their transfer student share while publics do not. Transfer enrollment rates also vary by other factors, as they are lower at institutions with lower attrition rates, more financial resources, more freshmen in campus housing, higher tuition and fees, and a 1994 Carnegie Classification of Liberal Arts I.; The second half of the dissertation investigates how two specific characteristics of an institution's student body (the transfer enrollment rate and the variance of student ability) affects the future labor market success of its students. A theoretical discussion incorporating peer effects and employer screening predicts that an increase in the variance of student ability will improve earnings for the top students at the institution relative to those at the bottom of the institution's ability distribution. In addition, an increase in the transfer enrollment rate is predicted to affect earnings for transfers relative to direct attendees. Empirical analyses using data from the High School and Beyond survey find some limited evidence supporting these predictions. |
