How do transparent admission standards affect students’ application to the college-bound upper-secondary school track?

All education systems track students at least one point in their school career. Among these tracks, one (or more) typically leads to the tertiary (college) level, while another (or more) offers vocational qualifications. However, not all qualified students apply to the college-bound secondary track. A growing number of empirical studies show that a school’s admission standards might deter students from applying to schools that otherwise would accept them. The logic behind this is that schools’ (high) admission standards incorporate the risk of rejection—an adverse event that students want to avoid. In this research, we assume that students hold biased information about schools’ admission standards since schools’ exact admission standards are typically unknown to students due to the lack of official statistics. We further assume that correcting this information bias and informing qualified students about schools’ actual admission standards might motivate students to apply to college-bound secondary schools. Revealing schools’ admission standards is an easily scalable, low-cost intervention. Therefore, it is a good candidate for potential policy intervention.