A rainy or sweltering campus tour makes prospective students noticeably less likely to apply. At one selective U.S. college, students were 10% less likely to apply after a hot tour and 8% less likely after a tour with rain or snow.
The study is by Olivia Feldman, Joshua Hyman and Matthew McGann of Amherst College; Hyman is also affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research. It was issued as NBER Working Paper 34944 in March 2026 and also circulated as an Annenberg Institute EdWorkingPaper.
Tour records meet weather records
The researchers used admissions records from a highly selective college in the Northeastern U.S. covering 47,094 tour participants from summer 2016 through fall 2024. They matched each tour’s date and hour to local hourly weather data.
Tours there last about an hour, are mostly outdoors and are led by current undergraduates. Taking a tour plays no role in admissions at this college. Overall, 28.8% of participants applied.
To isolate the effect of weather, the team compared tours at the same time of day, in the same month and in the same academic term. The variation comes from unseasonable conditions, such as an unusually hot August day, which says little about what life at the college would be like.
Heat, rain and even clouds matter
Compared with tours in moderate temperatures, hot tours reduced applications by 2.9 percentage points, or 10.1%. Cold tours reduced them by 1.7 points (5.9%). Compared with sunny tours, precipitation cut applications by 2.4 points (8.3%) and cloud cover by 1.4 points (4.9%).
One worry is that the keenest families pick sunny days from the forecast. The effects held, and grew slightly, among the 27,242 participants who registered at least 10 days ahead, when forecasts are unreliable.
Some groups reacted far more strongly. Students from warmer home states drove the entire cold-weather effect, with a 14.6% drop. Male participants were 13.2% less likely to apply after a rainy tour. White participants showed no effect, while precipitation cut applications among Asian participants by 18.5%.
The bigger picture is reassuring. Using National Student Clearinghouse records, the authors found tour weather had little to no effect on whether students enrolled in any college, a four-year college or a selective one. A bad-weather tour changes where students apply, not where they end up.
The result runs opposite to a well-known 2010 study that found cloudy campus visits increased enrollment. The authors note that study used 1,284 applicants visiting after applying, while their sample is over thirty times larger and looks at tours before students apply.
Study Details:
- Title: “Feel” as a Determinant of College Choice: Evidence from Campus Tour Weather
- Authors: Olivia Feldman, Joshua M. Hyman, Matthew L. McGann
- Journal: NBER Working Paper No. 34944
- Publication Date: March 2026
- DOI: 10.3386/w34944