Econ 421: Economics of Reed College
Fall 2007
Assignment #3: Admission Officer for a Day
Due: Wednesday, September 26

In this assignment, you are the acting Dean of Admission (and acting Director of Financial Aid) at Reed College. Your admission staff has culled out the obviously unsuitable applications and is forwarding to you 40 applications for a final admission decision. Your target is to enroll 10 students out of these 40. Some of the students that you admit will choose to come to Reed; others will choose not to. [Hint: If you admit everyone, you will probably have about 15-20 enroll, but different applicants have different enrollment probabilities.] You have $110,000 in grant money to spend on their first-year expenses. In the past, the usual financial-aid policy has been to give no more than $2,500 in loans and $2,500 in self-help (summer earnings and work study) to admitted aid applicants and to meet the remainder of their need with a grant. (These numbers and the need numbers are rounded off to keep the arithmetic simple.)

After considering each application carefully, you are to arrive at a decision to admit or deny admission to the student. (Sorry, you don't get a wait list!) If the student has financial need, you are to decide on an aid package of grant, loan, and self-help. You might want to develop a priority list by assigning something like reader ratings to each student as you go through the applications, then go back and see how far down the list you have to go.

Your performance will be graded on your success in meeting your admission target, staying within the financial-aid budget, and attracting a high-quality first-year class.

Summaries of the students' applications are available in pdf form. Some of this summary information is also included on a spreadsheet that you are to use to record your decisions. Fill in the green cells on the spreadsheet with Yes or No for admission and dollar amounts as appropriate for aid. Save it with a file name that includes your last name and email it to Jeff before class begins on Wednesday, September 26.

Of course, there is uncertainty about who will attend if offered admission. This uncertainty will be resolved and the results of your admission and aid decisions will be revealed at Thursday's class, where the decisions and outcomes of class members will be compared and discussed.