This week in research #59

Here's what caught my eye in research over the past week:

• Saygin and Zhang (open access) find that the overall quality ratings on RateMyProfessor.com have a greater influence on course enrolment at a particular unnamed US research university than official teaching evaluations, particularly affecting the enrolment decisions of female students
• McCannon (with ungated earlier version here) finds that adding a NCAA Division III college football team has no statistically significant effect on undergraduate enrolment, and it reduces the proportion of enrolments who are women
• Dagorn and Moulin (open access) find a 3.7 percent decline in the probability of re-enrolment for the subsequent academic year among the first cohort of university students affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in France
• Pan et al. (open access) asked research participants to evaluate the same football videos with either visible or obscured players, and find that when players are visible, superstars receive lower performance ratings than non-superstars, and that this effect is even larger when the players' identities are obscured (maybe superstars aren't that great after all?)