How Do Parents Choose Schools for Their Children? Experimental Evidence from the Private Christian School Sector

Abstract

Research documents that nearly all parents of school-aged children in the general U.S. population strongly consider academic quality when choosing a school for their children. Many of these parents also prefer a religious setting for their children's education. However, little is known about how these school characteristics affect the stated preferences of parents of children in private faith-based schools. We conducted a conjoint experiment in which we presented 2474 parents in the private Christian school sector with three sets of three hypothetical schools, randomly varying each school's tuition level and the quality of academics, spiritual formation, and extracurricular opportunities. We found that lower quality spiritual formation and academic offerings substantially reduce the likelihood a school will be selected by about 30 percentage points. The quality of extracurricular opportunities and tuition levels influence the likelihood a school will be selected to a lesser degree—about 11 percentage points.