Housing bust good for Beavers?

According to an NBER working paper:

In The Effect of Housing Wealth on College Choice: Evidence from the Housing Boom (NBER Working Paper No. 18075), Michael Lovenheim and Lockwood Reynolds find that a $10,000 increase in a family’s housing wealth in the four years before they send a child off to college increases the likelihood that that child attends a public flagship school by 2 percent. Public flagship universities are the elite public universities in each state and are characterized by having higher student body SAT scores, higher faculty-student ratios, and more total and instructional spending per student than other public institutions. They usually cost more than other public schools as well. Given “growing evidence of the high labor market and educational attainment returns to college quality,” the authors conclude that the housing bust could change attendance decisions in ways that have “long-run effects on the supply of high-skilled labor and on income inequality.”

Although it’s worth pointing out that OSU students now have almost the same SAT scores as UO students. Scores for the OSU football players are 5% higher than for UO’s.