Optimizing Union College’s Admissions Recruitment Using High School Visits

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate the effectiveness of high school visits as a college recruiting method using Union College as a case study.  First, I estimate the effect of visits on applications.  While the data is observational, I estimate causal effects by exploring the variation in visits within each school.  Second, I evaluate the cost effectiveness of visits compared to other methods of recruiting.  Overall, given the yields of these various methods, I find that high school visits are less cost-effective than other methods such as buying names.  This result holds true under a variety of assumptions about the relative cost of visits. Therefore, on the margin, colleges such as Union should consider purchasing more names while visiting fewer schools.