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This paper studies the causal impacts of public universities on the outcomes of their marginally admitted students. I use administrative admission records spanning all 35 public universities in Texas, which collectively enroll 10 percent of American public university students, to systematically identify and employ decentralized cutoffs in SAT/ACT scores that generate discontinuities in admission and enrollment. The typical marginally admitted student completes an additional year of education in the four-year sector, is 12 percentage points more likely to earn a bachelor's degree, and eventually earns 5-10 percent more than their marginally rejected but otherwise identical counterpart. Marginally admitted students pay no additional tuition costs thanks to offsetting grant aid; cost-benefit calculations show internal rates of return of 19-23 percent for the marginal students themselves, 10-12 percent for society (which must pay for the additional education), and 3-4 percent for the government budget. Finally, I develop a method to disentangle separate effects for students on the extensive margin of the four-year sector versus those who would fall back to another four-year school if rejected. Substantially larger extensive margin effects drive the results.

We study the effects of the unionization of faculty at Canadian universities from 1970-2022 using an event-study design. Using administrative data which covers the full universe of faculty salaries, we find strong evidence that unionization leads to both average salary gains and compression of the distribution of salaries. Our estimates indicate that salaries increase on average by 2 to over 5 percent over the first 6 years post unionization. These effects are driven largely by gains in the bottom half of the wage distribution with little evidence of any impact at the top end. Our evidence indicates that the wage effects are primarily concentrated in the first half of our sample period. We do not find any evidence of an impact on employment.

We study the Tutoring Online Program (TOP), where: (i) tutoring is entirely online; (ii) tutors are volunteer university students, matched with underprivileged middle school students. We leverage random assignment to estimate effects during and after the pandemic (2020 and 2022), investigating channels of impact. Three hours of individual tutoring per week increased math performance by 0.23 SD in 2020 and 0.20 SD in 2022. Higher-dosage yielded stronger effects, while group tutoring smaller effects. TOP enhanced students' aspirations, socio-emotional skills and psychological well-being, but only during school closures. We also estimate the impact of TOP on tutors, finding increases in empathy. [This report received financial support from the Cariplo Foundation.]

We conduct a survey-based experiment with 2,776 students at a non-profit university to analyze income insurance demand in education financing. We offered students a hypothetical choice: either a federal loan with income-driven repayment or an income-share agreement (ISA), with randomized framing of downside protections. Emphasizing income insurance increased ISA uptake by 43%. We observe that students are responsive to changes in contract terms and possible student loan cancellation, which is evidence of preference adjustment or adverse selection. Our results indicate that framing specific terms can increase demand for higher education insurance to potentially address risk for students with varying outcomes.

College attendance has increased significantly over the last few decades, but dropout rates remain high, with fewer than half of all adults ultimately obtaining a postsecondary credential. This project investigates whether one-on-one college coaching improves college attendance and completion outcomes for former low- and middle-income income state aid recipients who attended college but left prior to earning a degree. We conducted a randomized control trial with approximately 8,000 former students in their early- to mid-20s. Half of participants assigned to the treatment group were offered the opportunity to receive coaching services from InsideTrack, with all communication done remotely via phone or video. Intent-to-treat analyses based on assignment to coaching shows no impacts on college enrollment and we can rule out effects larger than a two-percentage point (5%) increase in subsequent Fall enrollment.

We assess the role of information gaps in understanding gender differences in negotiation behavior by conducting a randomized information experiment on the 2018 to 2020 graduating cohorts of undergraduate business majors from Boston University. Prior to starting their job search, treated students were provided with objective information about the gender gap in negotiation among their peers along with the earnings changes conditional on negotiating. We find sizable immediate effects on negotiation intentions that persist to actual negotiation behavior, particularly for men. While the treatment affects women's negotiation behavior through belief-updating, the effects on men's behavior are primarily through increased salience of the information. Further, we find some evidence that gender-specific treatment spillovers likely contribute to the smaller average treatment effects on behavior for women. Overall, our findings suggest that such information interventions can help to nudge women who have potentially large financial returns to negotiation to realize these gains.

We examine the initial post-college geographic location decisions of students from hometowns in the Appalachian region that often lack substantial high-skilled job opportunities, focusing on the role of non-pecuniary considerations. Novel survey questions in the spirit of the contingent valuation approach allow us to measure the full non-pecuniary benefits of each relevant geographic location, in dollar equivalents. A new specification test is designed and implemented to provide evidence about the quality of these non-pecuniary measures. Supplementing perceived location choice probabilities and expectations about pecuniary factors with our new non-pecuniary measures allows us to estimate a stylized model of location choice and obtain a comprehensive understanding of the importance of pecuniary and non-pecuniary factors. We also combine the non-pecuniary measures with realized location and earnings outcomes to characterize inequality in overall welfare. [Support was received from the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Western Ontario.]

We study how human capital diversification, in the form of double majoring, affects the response of earnings to labor market shocks. Double majors experience substantial protection against earnings shocks, of 56%. This finding holds across different model specifications and data sets. Furthermore, the protection double majors experience is more pronounced when the two majors are more distantly related, highlighting the importance of diverse skill sets. Additional analyses demonstrate that double majors are more likely to work in jobs that require a diverse set of skills and knowledge and are less likely to work in occupations that are closely related to their majors.

University-based scientific research has long been argued to be a central source of commercial innovation and economic growth. Yet at the same time, there have been long-held concerns that many university-based discoveries never realize their potential social benefits. Looking across universities, research and commercialization activities such as start-up formation vary tremendously -- variation that could reflect the composition and orientation of faculty research, university-level factors such as patenting and licensing efforts, or broader place-based factors such as location in a technology cluster. We take a first step towards unpacking this heterogeneity in university commercialization by analyzing how the propensity of academic research to spill over to commercial innovation changes when academics move across universities. Our estimates suggest that at least 15-25% of geographic variation in commercial spillovers from university-based research is attributable to place-specific factors. [Funding for this research was received from Harvard Business School's Division of Research and Doctoral Programs, Harvard Economics' SUPER Program.]

We examine how the racial wealth gap interacts with financial aid in American higher education to generate a disparate impact on college access and outcomes. Retirement savings and home equity are excluded from the formula used to estimate the amount a family can afford to pay. All else equal, omitting those assets mechanically increases the financial aid available to families that hold them. White families are more likely to own those assets and in larger amounts. We document this issue and explore its relationship with observed differences in college attendance, types of institutions attended, degrees attained, and education debt using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS), and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). We show that this treatment of assets provides an implicit subsidy worth thousands of dollars annually to students from families with above-median incomes. White students receive larger subsidies relative to Black students and Hispanic students with similar family incomes, and this gap in subsidies is associated with disadvantages in educational advancement and student loan levels. It may explain 10 percent to 15 percent of white students' advantage in these outcomes relative to Black students and Hispanic students.

It is generally agreed upon that most individuals who acquire a college degree do so in their early 20s. Despite this consensus, we show that in the US from the 1930 birth cohort onwards a large fraction -- around 20% -- of college graduates obtained their degree after age 30. We explore the implications of this phenomenon. First, we show that these so-called late bloomers have significantly contributed to the narrowing of gender and racial gaps in the college share, despite the general widening of the racial gap. Second, late bloomers are responsible for more than half of the increase in the aggregate college share from 1960 onwards. Finally, we show that the returns to having a college degree vary depending on the age at graduation. Ignoring the existence of late bloomers therefore leads to a significant underestimation of the returns to college education for those finishing college in their early 20s.

Poor post-secondary education infrastructure and opportunities partly explain the low higher education rates in developing countries. This paper estimates the effect of a program that improved post-secondary education infrastructure by building many university campuses across Uruguay. Leveraging temporal and geographic variation in program implementation, we use a two-way fixed effect design and comprehensive administrative records to assess the program's causal impact. By lowering the distance to a university campus, the program successfully increased university enrollment, particularly of less privileged students who are the first in their families to attend a university. The program impacted students from localities up to 30 kilometers from the new campus, reducing spatial inequality. Importantly, this expansion did not lower university completion rates. Furthermore, the program increased high school attendance and completion rates and the proportion of educated workers in the affected localities. [Funding for this report was provided by CAF.]

The paper studies the impact of financial aid on long-term educational attainment and labor market outcomes in Colombia. In 2014, the government launched a large-scale and generous student loan program called "Ser Pilo Paga." It offered full tuition coverage to students admitted to one of 33 government-certified high-quality universities known for superior test scores, graduation rates, and per-student spending. Notably, completing a bachelor's degree converted the loan into a grant. To qualify, students must score in the top 10% of the standardized high school exit exam and have below-median household wealth. Using RD and DD methodologies, we use nationwide administrative microdata linking all high school test takers, postsecondary attendees, and formal workers to estimate impacts up to eight years after high school. Financial aid improves college enrollment, quality, and attainment, particularly in STEM-related fields. The earnings gains are substantial, growing, and driven partly by high-quality universities improving students' skills, as demonstrated by their performance on Colombia's college graduation exam. A welfare analysis using the MVPF yields over $4.8 per dollar of government spending. Lastly, the program narrowed socioeconomic gaps in college attainment, skill development, and earnings among academically similar students without adversely affecting non-recipients, thereby promoting equity and efficiency.

Past work has documented significant occupational segregation between Black and white workers in the U.S. labor force. Little work, however, has examined racial occupational segregation in recent years or by levels of education and then at the intersection of education and race. In this paper, we contribute to this literature by calculating a dissimilarity index to examine racial occupational segregation between 1980 and 2019, comparing Black and white workers with and without bachelor's degrees and by developing a Monte Carlo simulation, where we compare the observed levels of segregation to predicted levels of racial occupational segregation by education under race-neutral conditions. First, we find that considerable racial occupation segregation in the labor market persists today regardless of educational attainment and that observed segregation is substantially higher than would be expected at random, conditional on educational attainment, gender, and geography. We compare the types of occupations in which Black and white workers are disproportionately situated, and we show that this segregation has significant consequences for wage inequality between Black and white workers with and without four-year degrees. Overall, our results show that racial occupational desegregation has stalled in the past two decades despite rising educational attainment amongst Black workers.

While the direct impacts of minimum wage changes on employment have received considerable attention, these policy changes have the potential to impact skill attainment by changing the opportunity cost of college enrollment. Using institutional data on college enrollment and program completion, we find that enrollment falls markedly among students at public two-year institutions in response to increases in the minimum wage. The largest enrollment effects are seen for those students who are enrolled in part-time courses of study at community colleges. The effect of minimum wage changes on credential attainment is limited to modest effects for women at the associate degree level, suggesting that the changes primarily impact the enrollment of students who are unlikely to have been diverted from degree attainment.

How do college students and postsecondary institutions react to changes in skill demand in the U.S. labor market? We quantify the magnitude and nature of response in the 4-year sector using a new measure of labor demand at the institution-major level that combines online job ads with geographic locations of alumni from a professional networking platform. Within a shift-share setup, we find that the 4-year sector responds. We estimate elasticities for undergraduate degrees and credits centered around 1.3, generally increasing with time horizon. Changes in non-tenure-track faculty allocations and the credits they teach partially mediate this overall response. We provide further evidence that the magnitude of the overall response depends on both student demand and institutional supply-side constraints. Our findings illuminate the nature of educational production in higher education and suggest that policy efforts that aim to align human capital investment with labor demand may struggle to achieve such goals if they target only one side of the market.

Does a school district that expands school choice provide better outcomes for students than a neighborhood-based assignment system? This paper studies the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program, a school choice initiative of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left attendance-zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We study market-level impacts of choice on student achievement and college enrollment using a differences-in-differences design. Student outcomes in ZOC markets increased markedly, narrowing achievement and college enrollment gaps between ZOC neighborhoods and the rest of the district. The effects of ZOC are larger for schools exposed to more competition, supporting the notion that competition is a key channel. Demand estimates suggest families place substantial weight on schools' academic quality, providing schools with competition-induced incentives to improve their effectiveness. The evidence demonstrates that public school choice programs have the potential to improve school quality and reduce neighborhood-based disparities in educational opportunity. [Funding was provided by the Center for Labor Economics.]

There is debate over whether Asian American students are admitted to selective colleges and universities at lower rates than white students with similar academic qualifications. However, there have been few empirical investigations of this issue, in large part due to a dearth of data. Here we present the results from analyzing 685,709 applications from Asian American and white students to a subset of selective U.S. institutions over five application cycles, beginning with the 2015-2016 cycle. The dataset does not include admissions decisions, and so we construct a proxy based in part on enrollment choices. Based on this proxy, we estimate the odds that Asian American applicants were admitted to at least one of the schools we consider were 28% lower than the odds for white students with similar test scores, grade-point averages, and extracurricular activities. The gap was particularly pronounced for students of South Asian descent (49% lower odds). We trace this pattern in part to two factors. First, many selective colleges openly give preference to the children of alumni, and we find that white applicants were substantially more likely to have such legacy status than Asian applicants, especially South Asian applicants. Second, after adjusting for observed student characteristics, the institutions we consider appear less likely to admit students from geographic regions with relatively high shares of applicants who are Asian. We hope these results inform ongoing discussions on the equity of college admissions policies.

Affirmative action in higher education can lead to mismatch, where students admitted through preferential treatment struggle academically due to inadequate preparation before college. Although some students may face initial challenges, by providing access to quality education for talented individuals who might have otherwise been overlooked due to systemic disadvantages, these programs may enable students to bridge the gap and catch up to their peers. In this study, we examine the effects of a quota-type affirmative action policy on gaps in college outcomes between potential beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries. Using comprehensive administrative data from a leading Brazilian university which implemented affirmative action in 2005, we find that compared to their non-quota peers, potential quota beneficiaries are less likely to progress smoothly through college and less likely to graduate, a result that is mostly driven by those who would not be admitted to the university otherwise. Notably, however, most of these differences shrink as the students progress through college, suggesting a catch-up effect between those groups. While potential quota students initially face challenges, resulting in a reduced course load in their early college years, they compensate by taking more credits in later years to ultimately graduate. [Additional funding for this report was provided by the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University, the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), and the World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER).]

We explore how much borrowers value student debt relief, in the setting of the federal Teacher Loan Forgiveness (TLF) program, and further document whether information and eligibility for this program affect teacher employment decisions. The program cancels between $5,000 and $17,500 in debt for teachers who remain employed in a high-need school for five consecutive years. Using both quasi-experimental evidence and a randomized control trial, we find that neither eligibility nor a targeted information intervention result in changes in teacher employment decisions, despite the presence of sizable student loan balances in our sample. Information was found, however, to increase application and receipt rates for teachers who had already accrued the five years of eligibility. Additional evidence from contingent valuation surveys suggests that teachers do in general value possible debt relief. Incorporating qualitative evidence from focus groups, we conclude that take-up may be constrained by program complexity and administrative barriers that involve knowing which schools qualify, tracking employment records, having employers sign off, and coordinating with loan servicers.

Historically Black colleges and universities are institutions that were established prior to 1964 with the principal mission of educating Black Americans. In this essay, we focus on two main issues. We start by examining how Black College students perform across HBCUs and non-HBCUs by looking at a relatively broad range of outcomes, including college and graduate school completion, job satisfaction, social mobility, civic engagement, and health. HBCUs punch significantly above their weight, especially considering their significant lack of resources. We then turn to the potential causes of these differences and provide a glimpse into the "secret sauce" of HBCUs. We conclude with potential implications for HBCU and non-HBCU policy.

Many observers argue that diversity in Economics and STEM fields is critical, not simply because of egalitarian goals, but because who is in a field may shape what is studied by it. If increasing the rate of majoring in mathematically-intensive fields among women is a worthy goal, then understanding whether women's colleges causally affect that choice is important. Among all admitted applicants to Wellesley College, enrollees are 7.2 percentage points (94%) more likely to receive an Economics degree than non-enrollees (a plausible lower bound given negative selection into enrollment on math skills and major preferences). Overall, 3.2 percentage points--or 44% of the difference between enrollees and non-enrollees--is explained by college exposure to female instructors and students, consistent with a wider role for women's colleges in increasing female participation in Economics.

What is the impact of the minimum wage on the college wage premium? I show that job-ladder models imply that the effect should be small on impact--raising only the wages of workers bound by the minimum wage--and grow over time as workers slowly move up the job ladder. Guided by my theory, I present evidence that these dynamic effects are present and powerful. Estimated at the national level, I show that minimum wages--together with supply and demand--play a central role in shaping the evolution of the U.S. college premium. Estimated at the state level, I show that the elasticity of the college premium to the minimum wage is small on impact and grows dramatically over time. To verify my theory's mechanisms, I additionally document the dynamic impact of the minimum wage over the full wage distribution: on impact, wages rise only for the lowest percentiles (consistent with the literature) but over time this effect spills over up the wage distribution (consistent with my theory and my empirical results on the skill premium). On the basis of these theoretical and empirical results, I conclude that the minimum wage plays a central role in shaping the U.S. college premium and its variation across states.

In a pilot program during the 2016-17 admissions cycle, the University of California, Berkeley invited many applicants for freshman admission to submit letters of recommendation. This proved controversial within the university, with concerns that this change would further disadvantage applicants from disadvantaged groups. To inform this debate, we use this pilot as the basis for an observational study of the impact of submitting letters of recommendation on subsequent admission, with the goal of estimating how impacts vary across pre-defined subgroups. Understanding this variation is challenging in an observational setting because estimated impacts reflect both actual treatment effect variation and differences in covariate balance across groups. To address this, we develop balancing weights that directly optimize for "local balance" within subgroups while maintaining global covariate balance between treated and control units. Applying this approach to the UC Berkeley pilot study yields excellent local and global balance, unlike more traditional weighting methods, which fail to balance covariates within subgroups. We find that the impact of letters of recommendation increases with applicant strength. However, we find little average difference for applicants from disadvantaged groups, although this result is more mixed. In the end, we conclude that soliciting letters of recommendation from a broader pool of applicants would not meaningfully change the composition of admitted undergraduates.

Why is invention strongly positively correlated with parental income not only in the US but also in Finland which displays low income inequality and high social mobility? Using data on 1.45M Finnish individuals and their parents, we find that: (i) the positive association between parental income and off-spring probability of inventing is greatly reduced when controlling for parental education; (ii) instrumenting for the parents having a MSc-degree using distance to nearest university reveals a large causal effect of parental education on offspring probability of inventing; and (iii) the causal effect of parental education has been markedly weakened by the introduction in the early 1970s of a comprehensive schooling reform. [Funding for this report was provided by the ERC, the Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation, and FORTE.]

A primary rationale for public provision of K-12 education and state financing of school spending is that education fosters civic engagement and the development of social capital. However, limited evidence exists on whether and how school spending affects civic engagement. Virtually all studies focus on the impact of educational attainment (as opposed to school spending) on political activity. We provide the first causal evidence on how school spending affects volunteerism as well as voting. The court-ordered and legislative school finance reforms that occurred throughout the United States over recent decades led to large and plausibly exogenous shocks to K-12 school spending. We estimate difference-in-difference-in-differences (DDD) models to isolate the causal impact of school spending on civic engagement. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS), the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS), and the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS), we find that exogenous increases in school spending led to increases in the probability that young adults volunteer and the amount of time they spend volunteering. In contrast, we find little evidence that school spending impacts voting. Consistent with prior studies, we find that increases in school spending increase high school graduation and college attendance.

We introduce a model of the admissions process based upon standard agency theory and explore its implications with economics PhD admissions data from 2013-2019. We show that a subjective score that aggregates subjective ratings and recommendation letter features plays a more important role in determining admissions than an objective score based upon graduate record exam (GRE) scores. Subjective evaluations by references who write multiple letters are not only more influential than those of references who write one letter, but they are also more informative. Since multiple-letter references are also more highly ranked economists, this implies that there is a constraint on the supply of high-quality references. Moreover, we find that both the subjective and objective scores are correlated with job placement at a top economics department after the completion of the PhD. These indicators of individual achievement have a smaller effect than an undergraduate degree from an Ivy Plus school (i.e., Ivy League + Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago). In the self-selected pool of applicants, Ivy Plus graduates are twice as likely to be admitted to a top 10 graduate program and are much more likely to obtain an assistant professor position at a top 10 program upon PhD completion. Given that Ivy Plus students must pass a stringent selection process to gain admission to their undergraduate program, we cannot reject the hypothesis that admission committees use information efficiently and fairly. However, this also implies that there may be a return to attending a selective undergraduate program in order to be pooled with highly skilled individuals.

Lack of information and advising prior to college matriculation may contribute to poor post-secondary outcomes among non-traditional students. We conducted a large-scale, multi-arm field experiment with the U.S. Army to investigate whether a package of research-based personalized information and access to advising affects postsecondary choices and attainment among a large non-traditional adult population. We find no impact of the intervention on whether veterans enroll in college, on the quality of their college enrollment, or on their persistence in college. Our results suggest that influencing non-traditional populations' educational decisions and outcomes will require substantially more intensive programs.

Colleges compete to attract students by investing in amenities such as athletics, dormitories, and student activities. We examine the effect of student consumption of postsecondary amenities on academic achievement and future donation behavior in the context of Big-Time college sports. We resolve the selection issue using data from a large, public university with a highly-ranked men's basketball team, where student season tickets are awarded by lottery. Game attendance has small negative effects on academic performance but no impact on donation behavior. Negative academic effects are concentrated at the bottom of the achievement distribution and driven by in-state students and students attending during seasons when the team reaches the postseason tournament. We uncover no evidence of spillover effects to roommates. Our results suggest that certain postsecondary amenities may hinder academic performance, with little upside from future giving.

US universities have attracted hundreds of thousands of international students each year for the last decade. Some of these remain in the US after graduating and contribute to the high skilled labor supply in US labor markets. In this paper, we identify and estimate by how much one more international master's (or bachelor's) student increases the skilled labor supply of the US in the short-run. To estimate this "transition rate" we implement an instrumental variable estimation using quasi-random variation in the tuition charged to international students by public US universities in the year that they likely started their studies. We find that attracting an additional international student to a US university increases the local labor supply by about 0.23 employees for master's students and about 0.11 for bachelor's students. These averages conceal an important difference. While non-STEM bachelor's and master's students had negligible transition rates into US employment, STEM Master students have had significant transition rates around 0.2, especially after the 2008 reform of Optional Practical Training for STEM graduates.

In organizations, teams are ubiquitous. "Weakest Link" and "Best Shot" are incentive schemes that tie a group member's compensation to the output of their group's least and most productive member, respectively. In this paper, we test the impact of these incentive schemes by conducting two pilot RCTs (one in-person, one online), which included more than 250 graduate students in a graduate math class. Students were placed in study groups of three or four students, and then groups were randomized to either control, Weakest Link, or Best Shot incentives. We find evidence that such incentive approaches can affect test scores, both in-person and online.

Short-cycle higher education programs (SCPs) can play a central role in skill development and higher education expansion, yet their quality varies greatly within and among countries. In this paper we explore the relationship between programs' practices and inputs (quality determinants) and student academic and labor market outcomes. We design and conduct a novel survey to collect program-level information on quality determinants and average outcomes for Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Peru. Categories of quality determinants include training and curriculum, infrastructure, faculty, link with productive sector, costs and funding, and other practices on student admission and institutional governance. We also collect administrative, student-level data on higher education and formal employment for SCP students in Brazil and Ecuador and match it to survey data. Using machine learning methods, we select the quality determinants that predict outcomes at the program and student levels. Estimates indicate that some quality determinants may favor academic and labor market outcomes while others may hinder them. Two practices predict improvements in all labor market outcomes in Brazil and Ecuador--teaching numerical competencies and providing job market information--and one practice--teaching numerical competencies--additionally predicts improvements in labor market outcomes for all survey countries. Since quality determinants account for 20-40 percent of the explained variation in student-level outcomes, estimates indicate a role for quality determinants to shrink the quality gap among programs. These findings have implications for the design and replication of high-quality SCPs, their regulation, and the development of information systems.

There is a growing body of research examining the labor market returns to college major, motivated by the large returns to skill in the labor market. Prior research has focused almost exclusively on mean effects and has paid little attention to the role of earnings growth and variability. Using linked administrative data from Texas on public K-12 students followed through college into the labor market, we find that the focus on mean differences mask four important features of the returns to college majors. First, majors are associated with varying earnings growth, which makes the returns sensitive to the experience distribution of the sample analyzed. Second, average earnings effects vary across workers; quantile treatment effect estimates show that mean effects mask considerable effect heterogeneity. Third, major choice affects earnings variability within workers over time. College major effects on earnings and variability are negatively correlated; high return majors also have more stable earnings. Finally, there is substantial variation in returns across specific majors within aggregate major groups and across institutions. This variation suggests that estimate of returns to college major are sensitive to how majors are aggregated and the composition of institutions in the sample.

This paper examines how private college and university endowments affect financial aid, admissions selectivity, and the economic and racial composition of incoming students. Because endowment levels are a function of expenditures and alumni giving, which are endogenous to the outcomes of interest, the design exploits changes in endowments stemming from variation in investment returns over time and across peer institutions. Estimates reveal that growing endowments generate large and persistent increases in spending overall and for instruction, student services, and administration in particular. However, wealthier colleges and universities do not increase the number of students they serve or the fraction of students receiving aid, and only modestly increase the generosity of aid packages. Instead, these institutions offset higher freshman yield rates by becoming more selective and enrolling fewer low-income students and students of color. Overall, colleges and universities appear to use greater endowment wealth to increase spending and to become more selective, resulting in higher institutional rankings, but do not increase the size or diversity of their student bodies. The results are important in light of the preferential tax treatment of endowments and interest in increasing access to elite postsecondary education for underserved populations.

Proposed "free college" policies vary widely in design. The simplest set tuition to zero for everyone. More targeted approaches limit free tuition to those who demonstrate need through an application process. We experimentally test the effects of these two models on the schooling decisions of low-income students. An unconditional free tuition offer from a large public university substantially increases application and enrollment rates. A free tuition offer contingent on proof of need has a much smaller effect on application and none on enrollment. These results are consistent with students placing a high value on financial certainty when making schooling decisions.

We develop and estimate a life-cycle model in a rational addiction framework where youth choose to smoke, attend school, work part-time, and consume while facing borrowing constraints. The model features multiple channels for studying the reciprocal causal effects of addiction and education. Variations in endowments and cigarette prices are sources of identification. We show that education causally reduces smoking. A counterfactual experiment finds that in absence of cigarettes, college attendance rises by three percentage points in the population. A practical alternative of 40% additional excise tax achieves similar results. Impacts vary substantially across persons of different cognitive and non-cognitive abilities.

Since the spring of 2021, nearly 700 colleges and universities in the U.S. have mandated that their students become vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus. We leverage rich data on colleges' vaccination policies and semester start dates, along with a variety of county-level public health outcomes, to provide the first estimates of the effects of these mandates on the communities surrounding four-year, residential colleges. In event study specifications, we find that, over the first 13 weeks of the fall 2021 semester, college vaccine mandates reduced new COVID-19 cases by 339 per 100,000 county residents and new deaths by 5.4 per 100,000 residents, with an estimated value of lives saved between $9.7 million and $27.4 million per 100,000 residents. These figures suggest that the mandates reduced total US COVID-19 deaths in autumn 2021 by approximately 5%.

The increasing tension between the perceived necessity of a college degree and the challenge of paying for it has led to a proliferation of financial aid policy in the U.S. and around the world. More students are receiving more aid today, and more different types of aid, than ever before. Half a century of policy experimentation has led to an equally impressive accumulation of research evidence, facilitated by methodological advances and the widespread availability of student-level administrative data. In this chapter, we present the economic rationale for financial aid, a summary of how aid works in the U.S. context, and common methodological challenges in the study of financial aid. We then review the evidence from both inside and outside the U.S. on the causal impact of a variety of financial aid policies and programs on students' college decisions, attainment, and post-college outcomes, and summarize the overarching themes with respect to margins of impact, mechanisms, and heterogeneity. We conclude with a discussion of future directions for research.

The federal government and many individual organizations have invested in programs to support diversity in the STEM pipeline, including STEM summer programs for high school students, but there is little rigorous evidence of their efficacy. We fielded a randomized controlled trial to study a suite of such programs targeted to underrepresented high school students at an elite, technical institution. The STEM summer programs differ in their length (one week, six weeks, or six months) and modality (on-site or online). Students offered seats in the STEM summer programs are more likely to enroll in, persist through, and graduate from college, with gains in institutional quality coming from both the host institution and other elite universities. The programs also increase the likelihood that students graduate with a degree in a STEM field, with the most intensive program increasing four-year graduation with a STEM degree attainment by 33 percent. The shift to STEM degrees increases potential earnings by 2 to 6 percent. Program-induced gains in college quality fully account for the gains in graduation, but gains in STEM degree attainment are larger than predicted based on institutional differences. [Financial support also provided by the Teachers College Provost's Investment Fund, the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan, and the Lab for Economic Applications and Policy at Harvard University.]

This paper examines the bias arising from individuals' migration from administrative outcome data, with a focus on the labor market consequences of postsecondary education. We find that out-of-state migration is particularly problematic for high-earners, flagship graduates, and certain majors. Consequently, the effect of graduating from a flagship university is 10% higher than one would estimate using in-state earnings exclusively, though the extent of bias differs substantially across contexts. The impact of obtaining a 2-year CTE credential is also understated, as are earnings differences across majors. Approaches to testing for and bounding this bias are considered.

College admissions in many countries are based on a centrally administered test. Applicants invest a great deal of resources to improve their performance on the test, and there is growing concern about the large costs associated with these activities. We consider modifying such tests by introducing performance-disclosure policies that pool intervals of performance rankings, and investigate how such policies can improve students' welfare in a Pareto sense. Pooling affects the equilibrium allocation of students to colleges, which hurts some students and benefits others, but also affects the effort students exert. We characterize the Pareto frontier of Pareto improving policies, and also identify improvements that are robust to the distribution of college seats. We illustrate the potential applicability of our results with an empirical estimation that uses data on college admissions in Turkey. We find that a policy that pools a large fraction of the lowest performing students leads to a Pareto improvement in a contest based on the estimated parameters. We then conduct a laboratory experiment based on the estimated parameters to examine the effect of such pooling on subjects' behavior. The findings generally support our theoretical predictions. Our work suggests that identifying and introducing Pareto improving performance-disclosure policies may be a feasible and practical way to improve college admissions based on centralized tests.

School assignment in Boston and New York City came to national attention in the 1970s as courts across the country tried to integrate schools. Today, district-wide choice allows Boston and New York students to enroll far from home, perhaps enhancing integration. Urban school transportation is increasingly costly, however, and has unclear integration and education consequences. We estimate the causal effects of non-neighborhood school enrollment and school travel on integration, achievement, and college enrollment using an identification strategy that exploits partly-random assignment in the Boston and New York school matches. Instrumental variables estimates suggest distance and travel boost integration for those who choose to travel, but have little or no effect on test scores and college attendance. We argue that small effects on educational outcomes reflect modest effects of distance and travel on school quality as measured by value-added.

This paper estimates the heterogeneous labor market effects of enrolling in higher education short-cycle (SC) programs. Expanding access to these programs might affect the behavior of some students (compliers) in two margins: the expansion margin (students who would not have enrolled in higher education otherwise) and the diversion margin (students who would have enrolled in bachelor's programs otherwise). To quantify these responses, we exploit local exogenous variation in the supply of higher education institutions (HEIs) facing Colombian high school graduates in an empirical multinomial choice model with several instruments. According to our findings, the presence of at least one HEI specialized in SC programs in the vicinity of the student's high school municipality increases SC enrollment by 3.7-4.5 percentage points (40-50% of the SC enrollment rate). The diversion margin largely drives this effect. For female compliers, enrollment in SC programs increases formal employment relative to the next-best alternative. For male compliers, in contrast, it lowers formal employment and wages. These results should alert policymakers of the unexpected consequences of higher education expansionary policies.

Non-financial barriers to college are an important possible explanation for socioeconomic, racial, gender, and other gaps in college access and success. A sizeable economic literature documents policy efforts to understand and address these barriers. We review this literature on non-financial interventions for improving college access and success ranging from discreet and narrowly defined interventions to comprehensive and multifaceted programs and systemic-level solutions.

We analyze the effect of Colombia's ambitious "Free Housing" program on children's educational outcomes. The program was generous, giving free housing to beneficiaries in desirable areas. We evaluate the program by leveraging housing lotteries and linking applicants to their children. We find that public housing increases high school graduation by seven percentage points -- a seventeen percent increase relative to the control mean -- and boosts exit exam scores and college-going. Using a survey to explore mechanisms, lottery winners report better environmental conditions and shorter commute times. Their children also attend better schools and live in neighborhoods with less crime. [Additional funding for this project was provided by the Departamento Nacional de Planeacion (Contract 672-2019).]

This paper introduces a new measure of the labor markets served by colleges and universities across the United States. About 50 percent of recent college graduates are living and working in the metro area nearest the institution they attended, with this figure climbing to 67 percent in-state. The geographic dispersion of alumni is more than twice as great for highly selective 4-year institutions as for 2-year institutions. However, more than one-quarter of 2-year institutions disperse alumni more diversely than the average public 4-year institution. In one application of these data, we find that the average strength of the labor market to which a college sends its graduates predicts college-specific intergenerational economic mobility. In a second application, we quantify the extent of "brain drain" across areas and illustrate the importance of considering migration patterns of college graduates when estimating the social return on public investment in higher education.

Early research on the returns to higher education treated the postsecondary system as a monolith. In reality, postsecondary education in the United States and around the world is highly differentiated, with a variety of options that differ by credential (associates degree, bachelor's degree, diploma, certificate, graduate degree), the control of the institution (public, private not-for-profit, private for-profit), the quality/resources of the institution, field of study, and exposure to remedial education. In this Chapter, we review the literature on the returns to these different types of higher education investments, which has received increasing attention in recent decades. We first provide an overview of the structure of higher education in the U.S. and around the world, followed by a model that helps clarify and articulate the assumptions employed by different estimators used in the literature. We then discuss the research on the return to institution type, focusing on the return to two-year, four-year, and for-profit institutions as well as the return to college quality within and across these institution types. We also present the research on the return to different educational programs, including vocational credentials, remedial education, field of study, and graduate school. The wide variation in the returns to different postsecondary investments that we document leads to the question of how students from different backgrounds sort into these different institutions and programs. We discuss the emerging research showing that lower-SES students, especially in the U.S., are more likely to sort into colleges and programs with lower returns as well as results from recent U.S.-based interventions and policies designed to support success among students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The Chapter concludes with some broad directions for future research.

Using detailed admissions data made public in the SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC cases, we examine how racial preferences for under-represented minorities (URMs) affect their admissions to Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill. At Harvard, the admit rates for typical African American applicants are on average over four times larger than if they had been treated as white. For typical Hispanic applicants the increase is 2.4 times. At UNC, preferences vary substantially by whether the applicant is in-state or out-of-state. For in-state applicants, racial preferences result in an over 70% increase in the African American admit rate. For out-of-state applicants, the increase is more than tenfold. Both universities provide larger racial preferences to URMs from higher socioeconomic backgrounds.

Substantial increases in public university tuition often raise concerns about college affordability. But assessment of the impacts on low- and moderate-income families requires consideration of whether net tuition--tuition less grant aid--has increased commensurately. This paper describes recent shifts in net tuition by family income and institution type and assesses the role of changes in state funding in generating these shifts. Using data reported by universities on net tuition paid by students from different family income levels, we find that public research universities have increasingly shifted to high-tuition, high-aid pricing. From 2012 to 2018, net tuition fell by far more than would have been predicted by the growth in state appropriations, while tuition levels continued to rise, albeit at a slower rate than in the prior years. The increased progressivity in pricing, particularly among research universities, cannot be explained by changes in state appropriations.

How do poor entrepreneurs trade off investments in business enterprises versus children's human capital, and how do these choices influence intergenerational socio-economic mobility? To examine this, we exploit experimental variation in household income resulting from a one-time relaxation of household liquidity constraints (Field et al., 2013), and track schooling and business outcomes over the subsequent 11 years. On average, treatment households, who were made wealthier through the experiment, increase human capital investment such that their children are 35% more likely to attend college. However, schooling gains only accrue to children with literate parents, among whom college attendance nearly doubles. In contrast, treatment effects on investment among the illiterate accrue only on the business margin and are accompanied by adverse educational outcomes for children. As a result, treatment lowers relative educational mobility. In a forecasting exercise, we find that earnings gains for literate households are four times larger than the earnings gains for illiterate households, raising earnings inequality. Our findings highlight how parental investment choices can contribute to a growth in intergenerational earnings inequality despite reductions in urban poverty. [Additional funding was provided by PEDL, IPA SME, and WAPP Harvard.]