Come rain or shine? How weather impacts students’ choices

Course content. Modern facilities. Graduate outcomes. Tuition costs. University rankings. These are just some of the factors that will determine where someone chooses to study, given all the options open to them. But a new paper has found that another factor out of institutions’ control may also have an impact – the weather.

Researchers combined dates and times of campus tours with hourly weather data to test whether it influenced student choices.

The paper, published in the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), found that, compared with moderate temperatures, students are 10 per cent less likely to apply when their tour is hot, and 6 per cent less likely if it is cold.

Rain impacted applications by 8 per cent and cloudy conditions by 5 per cent.

Co-author Joshua Hyman, associate professor of economics at Amherst College, told Times Higher Education that students use the limited time on a campus tour to decide whether an institution would be a good fit for them.

“They end up relying partly on their impressions from the campus tour, and those impressions will be worse if they are slightly miserable during the tour due to poor weather.

“While somewhat irrational, it also seems quite reasonable, and consistent with economics research about decision-making in other contexts, that students’ mood while forming an opinion about the college plays a role in their application decision.”

The study, which took place at a highly selective university in the north east of the US, found that the adverse effect of cold temperatures is driven entirely by students from warmer home states, who are 15 per cent less likely to apply.

The researchers said that, in comparison with other factors, students’ impressions of whether they will thrive personally, academically and socially – the “feel” of a college – have been understudied.

Hyman said other factors that could influence prospective applicants that are beyond the control of the institutions include a friend or family member’s past impression of the institution, or a particular news story that breaks during the college application season.

“We have uncovered tour weather as another such factor, but this doesn’t mean that rankings and marketing efforts don’t matter or are a poor use of institution resources, just as a company advertising its product does not expect that the advertisement will be the sole influence on the consumer’s decision.”

Overall, the effect of weather seems to impact men more than women. Male applicants are 13 per cent less likely to apply if it rains than females.

And students from ethnic minorities are much more impacted than white applicants. Rain during a tour reduces application rates by 19 per cent among Asians.

This means that tour weather may have an outsized impact at institutions where more men or people from ethnic minorities apply, according to Hyman.

“The more attractive an institution is to a student, the less it seems like minor things like tour weather should have an impact,” he added. “Perhaps tour weather has the greatest impact on students who are on the fence about applying.”

patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com