IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/33800.html

College Course Shutouts

Author

Listed:
  • Kevin J. Mumford
  • Richard W. Patterson
  • Anthony Yim

Abstract

What happens when college students cannot enroll in the courses they want? Using conditional random assignment to oversubscribed courses at a large public university, we find that a course shutout reduces the probability that a student ever takes any course in the corresponding subject by 30%. Course shutouts are particularly disruptive for female students, reducing women's cumulative GPAs, probability of majoring in STEM, on-time graduation, and early-career earnings. In contrast, shutouts do not appear to be disruptive to male students' long-run outcomes, with one exception—shutouts significantly increase the probability that men choose a major from the business school.

Suggested Citation

  • Kevin J. Mumford & Richard W. Patterson & Anthony Yim, 2025. "College Course Shutouts," NBER Working Papers 33800, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33800
    Note: ED
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w33800.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • I23 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Higher Education; Research Institutions
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33800. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.