"Feel" as a Determinant of College Choice: Evidence from Campus Tour Weather

The feeling or impression that students get about enrolling in a particular college may be an important determinant of their college application decision. Combining institutional records on college campus tour participants over the last decade with hourly weather information, we leverage tour weather as a plausibly exogenous shock to students' "feel" for attending the toured college. We find that poor tour weather reduces participants’ likelihood of applying. Tour participants, for example, are 10 percent less likely to apply when their tour is hot and 8 percent less likely when precipitation occurs during their tour. Using administrative data documenting where all tour participants enroll in college, we find that tour weather has little to no impact on the quality or type of college that participants ultimately attend. Nevertheless, our results suggest that students' "feel" for attending a college can play an important role in the college application decision.