College applications fall if weather is bad during tours, study suggests

By now, most high school seniors in the US will have submitted their college applications for the coming fall. However, new research suggests that their dossiers might not have made it to the universities they saw on drearier days.

As reported by The Wall Street Journal on Sunday, a study recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research provides hard evidence for what you might have always suspected: that bad weather on the day that students tour a college negatively affects whether they apply to that university (other major factors like facilities, faculty, and frats notwithstanding).

Based on eight years of data from an unspecified “highly-selective institution” in the Northeastern US (though the paper’s authors are, ahem, all researchers at Amherst College), the study shows the application rate rising to almost 32% for students that came on the most temperate tour days, up from ~25% and ~28% on the coldest and hottest days, respectively.

(The data excludes the pandemic period, when in-person tours were suspended.)

Degrees of separation

Meanwhile, the 30% application rate observed on sunny days slumped to 28.7% on cloudy days, and just 27.5% on rainy days. Interestingly, it was noted that the negative impact of cooler temperatures is driven almost entirely by students who hail from warmer states, with a 4.1 percentage point (14.6%) reduction observed for this cohort on cold days.

In the paper, researchers point out that though weather conditions impacted whether candidates submitted applications to a college, they had little to no impact on whether students who did apply actually enrolled. However, there are other signs that “feel” is influencing students’ college picks, as the Sun Belt’s Southern universities are seeing a boom in students from colder climes.