<p>I don’t have a link, but the study is called “A Revealed Preference Ranking of US Colleges and Universities,” authored by Avery, Glickman, Hoxby, and Metrick from December, 2005. I’m sure you can find it with a search. I incorrectly remembered it as a Wharton study. Only one of the authors is from Wharton; the others are from Harvard (2) and BU. The part on matriculation strategy is not the central point of the article – more of an aside. Their main goal, I think, was to suggest a method of ranking universities based on which ones students actually choose when given the choice rather than relying on more arbitrary measures like the UNSWR criteria.</p>