College Presence and the Selection of College.

The number of institutions of higher education increased by about 28 per cent in the United States from 1956 to 1967. This increase was partially caused by rising demands for college sciences and by over-crowding of existing facilities. It also reflected the belief of educators and legislators that more high school graduates would attend college if these graduates could attend a campus close to home. In this paper student choice patterns in counties with and without college facilities are examined to determine whether the presence of a college in a county affects the proportion of students from that county attending college, and a relationship exists between the presence of a given type of college in a county and the type of college chosen by students from that county, and students prefer to attend distant colleges when similar colleges are located nearby. Contradictory evidence exists on whether the proximity of colleges affects the demand for colleges. Corcoran and Keller used 1957 Minnesota data to focus on the difference between the proportions of metropolitan and non-metropolitan area residents going to college.