Do Students Care about University Quality when Choosing their University?

It is widely accepted that students' selection of Universities is strongly determined by distance and tuition fees. However, these contributions do not analyze the role of quality of education on students' decisions. In this paper we leave aside price and distance effects and we introduce variables associated to quality of universities such as students' and professors qualities and universities' facilities. We show that, for students registered in the studies of Economics and Business in public universities located in Barcelona, prospective students take into account both the quality of the faculty and the quality of their peers when they choose their university. Our results suggest also some potential risks of stratification of universities and segregation of students by their academic quality.