The Lord of The Ratings: How Online Reviews Influence University Applications

Third-party reviews play an important role in many contexts where the information available is not sufficient for decision-making. However, the impact of online reviews in the context of university applications has not been well studied in prior work. In this research-in-progress, we investigate the influence of online review ratings on university applications and the moderation effect of tuition on this relationship. Using Niche.com, we collected 61,928 and 312,260 online reviews for the top 100 liberal arts universities, and the top 100 national universities in the United States, respectively. Using a panel regression model over 13 years of data, we establish the relationship between review ratings and university applications moderated by tuition. The outcome helps to answer the question of how higher education institutions can best leverage online reviews to influence college choice. We discussed future analysis techniques and anticipated contributions.