Search

This study investigates how exposure to a field of study influences students’ major choices. If students have incomplete information, exposure potentially helps them to learn about the scope of a field as well as how well the field matches their interest and abilities. We exploit a natural experiment where university students have to write a research paper in business, economics, or law during their first year before they choose a major. Due to oversubscription of business papers, the field of the paper is assigned quasi-randomly. We find that writing in economics raises the probability of majoring in economics by 2.7 percentage points. We show further that this effect varies across subfields: the effect is driven by assignment to topics less typical of the public's perception of the field of economics, suggesting students learn through exposure that the field is broader than they thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a nationally representative sample from the 2004–09 Beginning Postsecondary Students (BPS) survey to examine the effect of education tax benefits on college completion. The paper employs a propensity score matching approach to correct for differences between eligible and ineligible students. Results suggest that tax benefits increase the likelihood of completing a college degree by 8 percentage points. The effect of tax benefits is largest for students who attended private and four-year institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the financial value over the course of a lifetime of pursuing a college degree under a variety of different settings (e.g. major, student loan debt, individual ability). I account for ability/selection bias and the probability that entering freshmen will not eventually graduate. I find the financial proposition of attending college is a sound investment for most individuals and cost scenarios, although some scenarios do not pay off until late in life, or ever. I estimate the present discounted value of attending college for the median student to vary between $85,000 and $300,000 depending on the student’s major. Most importantly, the results of this paper emphasize the role that risk (e.g. the nontrivial chance that a student will not eventually graduate) plays in the cost-benefit analysis of obtaining a college degree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically evaluates the effects of college admissions policies on high school students’ academic effort. I build a rank-order tournament model where high school students decide their level of effort and whether or not to take the college admissions test, considering how those decisions affect their future university admissions chances. Using administrative Chilean data for the 2009 college admissions process, I structurally estimate the parameters of the model. Two affirmative action policies are simulated: (a) SES-quota system, which imposes the population’s socioeconomic group (SES) distribution for each university; (b) increasing the weight of high school GPA in the admission final score. These simulations support the claim that affirmative action in college admission may boost the amount of academic effort exerted by high school students. I also find that while increasing the weight of high school GPA is more effective in boosting students’ academic effort in high school, the SES-quota system is more efficient in allocating the best students to the best universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents theoretical and empirical evidence that an increase in tuition fees may boost university students’ academic effort. We examine the tuition fee rise introduced in 2012 by Spanish universities, where students register and pay for their chosen modules and fees increase each time students retake a module until they pass it. Data refer to students of economics, business and medicine at the University of Valencia during 2010–2014. The fact that some students pay fees in full while others are exempt from payment provides an identifying source of variation that we exploit using a flexible difference-in-differences methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses administrative North Carolina data linked from high school to college and national surveys to characterize the largest contributor to the STEM gender gap: engineering. Disparities are the result of differential entry during high school or earlier rather than postsecondary exit. Differences in pre-college academic preparation account for 5 to 7% of the gap. Females’ relative lack of academic self-confidence explains 8%, while other-regarding preferences and professional goals capture a further 14%. Empirical evidence using identifying variation in the gender composition of twins in North Carolina shows that opposite-sex pairs are more likely to pursue gender-stereotypical majors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses data from the central admission system for Danish post-secondary education merged with other administrative data. Applicants for admission may rank up to eight educational programmes, and I focus on first-time applicants whose first-choice are bachelor's degree university programmes with restricted admission, i.e. with an admission threshold defined in terms of the grade point average obtained from upper secondary school. Using threshold crossing as an instrument for admission in a regression discontinuity design, I find that being admitted to the first-choice programme increases the probability of completing a master's degree in that subject by about 20 percentage points. There is no clear evidence that being admitted to one of the higher degree programmes listed on the application has an effect on years of education or the probability of completing a master's degree (although point estimates indicate small positive effects). There is no robust statistically significant effect on earnings 11 years after application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the short- and long-term impacts of an increase in merit-based scholarships with a novel data set containing 1114 recipients from the 2004 and 2005 doctoral competitions of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Using the scores received by recipients and the funding thresholds, I take advantage of a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal impact of an increase in scholarship amount on locational choice and career outcomes of recipients. First, I find no evidence that recipients are induced to remain in Canada when they are promised a larger scholarship if they study in Canada. Second, there is no evidence that receiving a larger scholarship affects the probability of PhD completion within either five or nine years. Third, there is some evidence that a larger scholarship does increase the probability of having a tenure-track academic position nine years after receiving the award by approximately 15 percentage points. This result only holds for students who were initially awarded the scholarship in their second year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between the start time and meeting frequency of college courses and the academic performance of students. Using administrative data from a large public university, we account for both student and instructor fixed effects. Consistent with a large literature, we find a positive time of day effect. That is, students earn higher grades in classes that start later. However, contrary to previous literature, we find students earn higher grades in classes with fewer meeting times when not accounting for instructor fixed effects. This effect is entirely explained by instructor sorting on course schedules. Instructors that assign higher grades, either due to quality of instruction or grade leniency, are more likely to meet twice a week rather than three times a week. Including instructor fixed effects, we find no difference in two-day a week classes and three-day a week classes. However, grades are lower in classes that meet just once a week. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the effects of a remedial education programme implemented in Spain between 2005 and 2012 that offered after-school classes for underperforming students from poor socioeconomic backgrounds. We use two different estimation strategies, re-weighting estimators and propensity score matching, and address the existence of selection bias. We find that this programme had a substantial positive effect on children’s academic achievement: the probability of falling behind the general progress of the group declined by between 3.5 and 6.4 percentage points and mean reading scores increased by between 8.5 and 17.4% of one standard deviation. We also find that a larger exposure to the programme improves students’ scores: whereas students in schools that participated in the programme for at most two years do not experience any significant positive effect, those in schools that participated for at least three years did. The programme significantly reduced the probability of belonging to the bottom part of the distribution (by between 3.2 and 7.7 percentage points) and improved mean scores (by between 8 and 21.5% of one standard deviation). Finally, we find that the impact of the programme is much stronger for students in rural schools than for students in urban schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To enhance college completion, many institutions have introduced college remedial programs. Yet, till now there is little evidence that this policy helps raise students’ persistence and performance in college. To better understand how to design cost-effective remedial education, this paper studies the impact of an intervention implemented in an undergraduate economics program in Italy. This remedial policy aims at raising students’ effort and performance by combining a short remedial course with the threat of re-enrolling them in the first year in case of a failure in the remedial exam. To estimate causal effects, I implement a sharp regression discontinuity design that exploits the cutoff rule used to assign students to remediation. Results indicate that this nudge-type policy fails to obtain any positive and significant effect on either persistence or performance in college. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost 40% of Canadian youth who left postsecondary education in 1999 had returned two years later. This paper investigates the extent to which schooling discontinuities affect post-graduation starting wages and whether the latter are influenced by the reasons behind these discontinuities. We use data from the 2007 National Graduate Survey. We apply Lewbel’s (2012) generated instruments approach. The source of identification is a heteroscedastic covariance restriction of the error terms that is a feature of many models of endogeneity. We also perform two-stage quantile regressions. We find a positive effect on wages of temporary interruption for men who held a full-time job during their out-of-school spell(s). Both men and women witness a wage decrease if their interruption depends on health issues. Women bear a wage penalty if their interruption is due to a part-time job, to lack of money, or is caused by reasons other than health, work, and money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many students who enter college are insufficiently prepared to follow a demanding college-level curriculum. Thus, higher education institutions often require low-performing students to repeat failed courses, a full term, or even a full year. This paper is the first to investigate the effects of such a “(grade) retention” policy on student performance in higher education. We study a setting where first-year undergraduates who fall short of a pre-defined performance requirement have to repeat all first-year courses before they can proceed to the second year. To determine the causal effect of retention and repetition on student performance, we apply a sharp regression discontinuity design to administrative data from a Swiss university. Based on a sample of 5000 students, we find that grade retention increases dropout probabilities after the first year by about 10 percentage points. Repetition of a full year persistently boosts grade point averages by about 0.5 standard deviations, but does not affect study pace and major choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program (MMUF) encourages underrepresented minority (URM) students to pursue PhD study with an eye toward entering academia. Fellows have completed PhDs at high rates relative to other students, but they are selected for their interest and potential. In this paper we use restricted access data from the Mellon Foundation and the National Science Foundation's Survey of Earned Doctorates to investigate the effect of the MMUF on PhD completions by URM students who graduate from participating institutions. We find no evidence that participation in the program causes a statistically significant increase in the numbers of PhDs completed by URM students, and increases greater than about one PhD per institution per cohort lie outside a 95% confidence interval of our estimates. This suggests that at least some of the PhDs completed by participants would have occurred without the program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their recent paper “(Un)informed College and Major Choice: Evidence from Linked Survey and Administrative Data,” Hastings, Neilson, Ramirez, & Zimmerman (2016) provide an informal costly-information model, linking family background to students’ beliefs about educational costs and benefits. They verify predictions of their model using a data set of beliefs about college institutions and majors among Chilean college applicants and students. I test some of those same predictions using a data set of beliefs about college institutions and different levels of college education among high school students in the United States. I verify their predictions, with some exceptions, supporting the use of their costly-search model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using student evaluations of their instructor as an outcome measure, we estimate and compare class size and teacher effects for higher education, with an emphasis on determining whether a comprehensive class size reduction policy that draws on the hiring of new teachers is likely to improve educational outcomes. We find that first time teachers perform significantly worse than their peers, and we find substantial class size effects. Hence higher education institutions face a tradeoff if they wish to increase admission. This tradeoff implies that as class size increases, at first the negative class size effect is smaller than that of introducing a first time teacher. However, beyond a certain level, the class size effect dominates and it is better to create a new class with a first time teacher. 1 1 We would like to thank Matías Covarrubias and Fernanda Rojas for excellent research assistance. We would also like to thank comments received in the internal workshop of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile’s Economics Department and in the 2011 Yearly Congress of the Economics Society of Chile. We also thank two anonymous referees whose advice greatly improved the paper. The usual disclaimer applies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European governments increasingly employ competitive university funding to improve performance in higher education. The framework that is developed in this paper suggests a donor-specific trade-off between fostering best performing universities and increasing university efficiency when introducing competitive funding in the university sector. We test this assertion based on a university-level panel dataset across eight European countries from 1994–2006. Estimating a simultaneous two-stage Stochastic Frontier Approach, we find that international public funds decrease the productivity of the best performing universities, which suggests a non-negligible effect because of the administrative burden induced by competitive funding. However, the competition for international public funds also disciplines universities as evidenced by a positive impact on efficiency. Conversely, tuition fees enhance the productivity of the best performing universities but increase the spread of universities with lower productivity, which suggests a strong sorting effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the impact of an educational programme recently introduced in the Province of Trento (North-East of Italy) aimed at fostering university enrolment of students from low-income families and at reducing inequalities in access to higher education. The programme consists in generous incentives: it targets university students from low-income families and is awarded upon both merit and demonstrated financial need. We exploit data from a survey conducted on a sample of upper secondary graduates linked to administrative records and employ a regression discontinuity design to estimate the impact of the intervention on the university enrolment decisions. We find that the programme has no significant effect on enrolment rates, but it exerts a positive effect on redirecting students already bound for university to enrol outside the place of residence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite copious research on the labor market returns to college, very little has adequately modeled the pathways of non-completers or compared their outcomes with those of award-holders. In this paper, we present a novel method for linking non-completers with completers according to their program of study. We use this method to calculate the labor market returns to programs of study, accounting for those who obtain an award and those who do not. We use a large dataset of community college transcripts matched with earnings data. We find that different classification systems – by algorithm, intent or goal – yield very different enrollment patterns across programs. Importantly, these classifications make a substantial difference to earnings patterns. Returns vary by program completion and by program non-completion. Consequently, combining completers and non-completers yields a new pattern of returns. We find that the variance in returns by subject of study is reduced when we combine data on completers and non-completers. In particular, the large returns to nursing awards are substantially lower when we account for the probability of completing a nursing program and the returns to not completing a nursing program. In addition, progression per se does not lead to higher earnings for non-completers: progressing further in a nursing program is no different from accumulating general college credits. If validated, these findings have significant implications for policies on program choice and on student retention policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the face of shrinking government budgets and a growing need to train a high-skilled labor force, policymakers have become increasingly interested in cost-effective measures that induce more students to apply to and enroll in college. In this paper, we use a regression discontinuity design to identify the causal effect of students receiving information about their own college-readiness after taking the ACT on their subsequent college enrollment decisions. Using data from Colorado, where all high school students are required to take the ACT, we find that students who receive information that they are college-ready are no more likely to attend college than those that do not receive this information. We discuss possible reasons for these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The female advantage in college enrollment and completion has generated concern among university officials and sparked debate about gender-conscious college admissions. There are a number of explanations for this increasing gender imbalance on college campuses. This paper focuses on the role played by admissions policies that base decisions solely on applicants’ high school grades. Given that females earn higher grades than males, such policies can contribute to growing female shares in admissions. To exemplify this trend, I use publicly-available data from Texas to show that the Texas Top 10% plan, which guarantees public university admission to students who graduate in the top decile of their high school class, led to an increase in the female share of accepted students. The increase was particularly large among black students, where the female share of admitted students was already highest among the major racial/ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, many states, including California, Texas, and Oregon, have changed admissions policies to increase access to public universities for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. A key concern, however, is how these students will perform. This paper examines the relationship between high school quality and student success in college. Using administrative data from the University of Texas at Austin, we take advantage of the unique policy environment provided by Texas's Top 10% automatic admissions law, which has not only increased the diversity of high schools in the state that send students to the university, but also provides an admission criteria based on a sole observable characteristic: high school class rank. We find that high school characteristics do affect student performance, and these effects seem more pronounced for women and low-income students. In addition, there is little evidence that the effects of high school characteristics decay over students’ time in college. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community colleges play a major role in postsecondary education, yet previous research has emphasized the impact of merit aid on four-year students rather than two-year students. Furthermore, researchers have focused on the impact of merit aid on enrollment and outcomes during college, but to my knowledge, none have yet considered the impact of aid on earnings after college. This paper utilizes discontinuities in eligibility criteria for a large merit scholarship to examine the local impact of aid on student outcomes both during college and after college. The findings suggest that reducing the cost of community college does not impact persistence, academic performance, degree completion, expected earnings, or short-term earnings after college for marginally eligible students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A lengthy literature estimating the returns to education has largely ignored the for-profit sector. In this paper, we estimate the earnings gains to for-profit college attendance using restricted-access data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97). Using an individual fixed effects estimation strategy that allows us to control for time-invariant unobservable characteristics of students, we find that students who enroll in associate's degree programs in for-profit colleges experience earnings gains of about 10% relative to high school graduates with no college degree, conditional on employment. Since associate's degree students attend for an average of 2.6 years, this translates to a 4% return per year of education in a for-profit college, slightly lower than estimates of returns for other sectors found in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a general methodology for measuring the value added of institutions of higher education using commonly available administrative data. Our approach recognizes the data limitations and selection problems inherent in higher education, and highlights the challenges these issues pose for education policy. Combining information from different administrative sources in the state of Texas, we follow the universe of Texas college applicants from the time of application (pre-enrollment) through public college and into the labor market. In specifications that do not control for selection, we find large, significant differences across colleges in terms of persistence, graduation, and earnings; however, these differences decrease substantially when we control for selection. In light of the growing interest in using value-added measures in higher education for both funding and incentivizing purposes, our methodology offers unique evidence and lessons for policy makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses variation in the timing of parental layoff to identify the effect of parental job loss on higher education enrollment. Unlike research that compares laid-off workers to workers who do not lose their jobs, all families in our analysis experience a layoff at some point. The treatment group (layoff when child is 15–17) and control group (layoff when child is 21–23) have statistically indistinguishable initial characteristics, but substantially different higher education enrollment rates. We find that parental job loss between ages 15 and 17 decreases college enrollment by 10 percentage points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When calculating financial need, the FAFSA does not consider the parental income of students who turn 24 years old. This paper uses the student's quarter of birth interacted with the treated cohort to instrument for financial need. Using the interaction mitigates many of the concerns regarding quarter of birth instruments. A dollar increase in financial need is associated with 15 cents in federal grants and 47 cents in loans. However, the relationship between financial need and institutional aid is, on average, small and statistically insignificant. The exception is that institutions with large endowments do allocate more aid to more-needy students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]