Results for “college” 1146 found
The Global Distribution of College Graduate Quality
We measure college graduate quality—the average human capital of a college’s graduates—for graduates from 2,800 colleges in 48 countries. Graduates of colleges in the richest countries have 50% more human capital than graduates of colleges in the poorest countries. Migration reinforces these differences: emigrants from poorer countries are highly positively selected on human capital. Finally, we show that these stocks and flows matter for growth and development by showing that college graduate quality predicts the share of a college’s students who become inventors, engage in entrepreneurship, and become top executives both within and across countries.
That is a new JPE piece by Paolo Martellini, Todd Schoellman, and Jason Sockin.
Student Demand and the Supply of College Courses
From a recent Jacob Light paper:
In an era of rapid technological and social change, do universities adapt enough to play their important role in creating knowledge? To examine university adaptation, I extracted the information contained in the course catalogs of over 450 US universities spanning two decades (2000-2022). When there are changes in student demand, universities respond inelastically, both in terms of course quantity and content. Supply inelasticity is especially pronounced in fields experiencing declining demand and is more pronounced at public universities. Using Natural Language Processing, I further show that while the content of existing courses remains largely unchanged, newly-created courses incorporate topics related to current events and job skills. Notably, at selective institutions, new content focuses on societal issues, while at less selective institutions, new content emphasizes job-relevant skills. This study contributes uniquely to our understanding of the supply-side factors that affect how universities adapt to the rapidly evolving landscape.
John Cochrane offers comment as well, the first half of the post is interesting on demographics also.
Those who graduate from college late in life
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.
That is from a new NBER paper by Zsófia L. Bárány, Moshe Buchinsky, and Pauline Corblet.
The Disparate Impacts of College Admissions Policies on Asian American Applicants
Dept. of Yikes, but at this point who is surprised?:
…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.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Joshua Grossman, Sabina Tomkins, Lindsay C. Page, and Sharad Goel.
The Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges
This is a long abstract, but it is meaty, and note that papers by these authors have held up well:
Leadership positions in the U.S. are disproportionately held by graduates of a few highly selective private colleges. Could such colleges — which currently have many more students from high-income families than low-income families — increase the socioeconomic diversity of America’s leaders by changing their admissions policies? We use anonymized admissions data from several private and public colleges linked to income tax records and SAT and ACT test scores to study this question. Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago) as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admissions rates for students with comparable test scores from high-income families; the remaining third is due to differences in rates of application and matriculation. In contrast, children from high-income families have no admissions advantage at flagship public colleges. The high-income admissions advantage at private colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, which tend to be stronger for students applying from private high schools that have affluent student bodies, and (3) recruitment of athletes, who tend to come from higher-income families. Using a new research design that isolates idiosyncratic variation in admissions decisions for waitlisted applicants, we show that attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. Ivy-Plus colleges have much smaller causal effects on average earnings, reconciling our findings with prior work that found smaller causal effects using variation in matriculation decisions conditional on admission. Adjusting for the value-added of the colleges that students attend, the three key factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas SAT/ACT scores and academic credentials are highly predictive of post-college success. We conclude that highly selective private colleges currently amplify the persistence of privilege across generations, but could diversify the socioeconomic backgrounds of America’s leaders by changing their admissions practices.
I’ll just pull out and bold a key sentence from there:
Adjusting for the value-added of the colleges that students attend, the three key factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas SAT/ACT scores and academic credentials are highly predictive of post-college success.
It would be so easy to change all this, right? Use scores and grades more, legacy less, extracurriculars less, and athletics less for admission purposes. Yet so many of them won’t make that switch. Why not? Model that!
The NBER working paper is by Raj Chetty, David J. Deming, and John N. Friedman. Here is some NYT coverage of the piece.
Women’s colleges and economics majors
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.
Here is the full NBER paper by . And here is a new paper about the value of HBCUs.
The Returns to College Admission for Academically Marginal Students
I combine a regression discontinuity design with rich data on academic and labor market outcomes for a large sample of Florida students to estimate the returns to college admission for academically marginal students. Students with grades just above a threshold for admissions eligibility at a large public university in Florida are much more likely to attend any university than below-threshold students. The marginal admission yields earnings gains of 22% between 8 and 14 years after high school completion. These gains outstrip the costs of college attendance, and they are largest for male students and free-lunch recipients.
Here is the Journal of Labor Economics piece by Seth D. Zimmerman. So is the non-statistically-summarized account of Susan Dynarski painting too negative a picture?
And do those people need debt forgiveness to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars? Write down your social welfare function!
This piece by David J. Deming surveys the broader literature, and with broadly concordant results.
A college degree ain’t what it used to be
Labor market outcomes for young college graduates have deteriorated substantially in the last twenty five years, and more of them are residing with their parents. The unemployment rate at 23-27 year old for the 1996 college graduation cohort was 9%, whereas it rose to 12% for the 2013 graduation cohort. While only 25% of the 1996 cohort lived with their parents, 31% for the 2013 cohort chose this option. Our hypothesis is that the declining availability of ‘matched jobs’ that require a college degree is a key factor behind these developments. Using a structurally estimated model of child-parent decisions, in which coresidence improves college graduates’ quality of job matches, we find that lower matched job arrival rates explain two thirds of the rise in unemployment and coresidence between the 2013 and 1996 graduation cohorts. Rising wage dispersion is also important for the increase in unemployment, while declining parental income, rising student loan balances and higher rental costs only play a marginal role.
That is from a new NBER paper by Stefania Albanesi, Rania Gihleb, and Ning Zhang.
Why have college completion rates increased?
Jeffrey T. Denning, Eric R. Eide, Kevin J. Mumford, Richard W. Patterson and Merrill Warnick tell us why: grade inflation:
We document that college completion rates have increased since the 1990s, after declining in the 1970s and 1980s. We find that most of the increase in graduation rates can be explained by grade inflation and that other factors, such as changing student characteristics and institutional resources, play little or no role. This is because GPA strongly predicts graduation, and GPAs have been rising since the 1990s. This finding holds in national survey data and in records from nine large public universities. We also find that at a public liberal arts college grades increased, holding performance on identical exams fixed.
That is from the new American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. And here are earlier ungated versions.
Why don’t elite colleges expand supply?
Peter Q. Blair (Harvard) and Kent Smetters (U. Penn) have a new paper based on that question, here is the abstract:
While college enrollment has more-than doubled since 1970, elite colleges have barely increased supply, instead reducing admit rates. This study shows that straightforward reasons cannot explain this behavior. The authors propose a model where colleges compete on prestige, measured using relative selectivity or relative admit rates. A key comparative static of the model is that higher demand decreases [increases] the admit rate when the weight on prestige is above [below] a critical value, consistent with experience in elite [non-elite] colleges. A calibrated version of the model closely replicates the pattern in the data of declining admit rates at elite colleges while counter-factual simulations without prestige fail. Prestige competition is inefficient. Allowing elite colleges to collude on admissions strategy internalizes the non-pecuniary prestige externality and is Pareto improving.
My answer is slightly different. I do not doubt that the postulated enrollment selectivity constraint binds in the short run. Nonetheless, I think if most of the top schools really wanted to take in more students, they could do a mix of “recalibrating” the data and lobbying the college raters in such a way that would allow larger classes to happen with little or no reputational penalty.
The true constraint is the faculty. Let’s say Harvard tried to grow by 3x. They would have to hire many new professors, and those are people who could not currently obtain tenure at Harvard. (Harvard could lure those people in, and afford them, right now, but they don’t.) So Harvard tenure standards would have to fall. In addition to tolerating these “lower standards,” the current interest groups controlling Harvard departments would find their power greatly diluted by all these newcomers. And so it doesn’t happen. When “self-interest” and “high standards” coincide in the academic world, it is very difficult to defeat that. At least on academic matters, faculty governance really is the order of the day at top universities.
And so the classes at most top universities stay small. By the way, a potential faculty expansion wouldn’t even have to be with tenure and voting rights. Say Harvard econ would invite in 15 dissident economists, of varying sorts, on “long enough to carry them to retirement” sorts of “no voting rights” contracts. Those people would teach, go to seminars, and in general liven up the environment and bring greater intellectual diversity. They would over time become a force and influence of their own. And so it ain’t gonna’ happen. Harvard has to stay relatively small.
So don’t believe them the next time faculty at top schools tell you they are egalitarian. They are not with their own resources at least, though they are happy to play the game with the resources of others.
Why don’t more people go to college?
This new piece in American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics seems to be channeling some parts of Bryan Caplan’s argument:
Despite increases in the college earnings premium to persistently high levels, investment in college education remains low. We can understand this apparent puzzle by considering the risk of attending college and, in particular, the possibility of failing to graduate. Students with a reasonable probability of completing college already enroll, and for those who do not enroll, the low chance of completion blunts the impact of the rising college premium. In the absence of improved college readiness, our quantitative results suggest that continuing long-standing trends in skill-biased technological change can be expected primarily to increase earnings inequality rather than college attainment.
From Kartik Athreya and Janice Eberly. The implied discontinuity in the de facto talent distribution also echoes some themes from my own Average is Over.
The best argument against the Electoral College
Contrary to conventional intellectual wisdom there are not many good ones, but this packs some real force:
Starting from probabilistic simulations of likely presidential election outcomes that are similar to the output from election forecasting models, we calculate the likelihood of disputable, narrow outcomes under the Electoral College. The probability that the Electoral College is decided by 20,000 ballots or fewer in a single, pivotal state is greater than 1-in-10. Although it is possible in principle for either system to generate more risk of a disputable election outcome, in practice the Electoral College today is about 40 times as likely as a National Popular Vote to generate scenarios in which a small number of ballots in a pivotal voting unit determines the Presidency.
And note this, which explains a good deal of the debate and rationalizations — on both sides:
This disputed-election risk is asymmetric across political parties. It is about twice as likely that a Democrat’s (rather than Republican’s) Electoral College victory in a close election could be overturned by a judicial decision affecting less than 1,000, 5,000, or 10,000 ballots in a single, pivotal state.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Michael Geruso and Dean Spears.
Incentives matter, high school college football divorce edition
For a transfer student to be immediately eligible under Georgia High School Association rules, he or she must make a “bona fide move,” in which the “student moved simultaneously with the entire parental unit or persons he/she resided with at the former school, and the student and parent(s) or persons residing with the student live in the service area of the new school.”
Moving to Georgia wasn’t a problem for Randy, who retired in 2012 after working for 32 years with the Los Angeles Police Department. Yvonne, who works as an administrative assistant, had to remain in California for her job. For Jake to be eligible for one season at Valdosta High, Randy and Yvonne legally separated to meet the Georgia residency rules. According to court records, Randy and Yvonne dissolved their marriage on Aug. 20. They plan to get back together once Jake’s season at Valdosta High ends.
“The requirements [are] a full family move, so that and, obviously, grades and that kind of thing,” Randy said. “So at this point, we got a legal separation. We’re right down the guidelines as far as being eligible to play.”
Here is the full story, via Tom G.
College football is education too
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
So far the data are fragmentary, but they indicate that parties, bar-going and after-hours fraternization — not athletic practices — have been the major risks contributing to Covid-19 clusters among young people of college age. For all the talk of banning athletics, how about university regulations banning all alcohol consumption (including off-campus) for all registered students, under the pain of academic suspension? [NB: more schools have started trying at least partial versions of this since I wrote the column.]…
There is the risk that football players and other collegiate athletes will bring the virus home to their parents and older relatives. Still, that danger seems to be at least as high if they are bored and going out drinking, compared to practicing and trying to secure their place on the team. It simply is not obvious that athletics create a new risk.
Under the current system, student athletes can opt not to participate, just as many NBA players have elected not to play in the league’s “bubble.” While there are social pressures to go ahead and play, they are no different than the pressures to socialize more generally. Yet there are no calls to ban young people from socializing, even though that too is clearly a dangerous activity — perhaps the most dangerous activity — in terms of Covid-19 spread.
There is much more at the link.
Why not buy up a college campus?
Could you set higher education right? Why don’t the super-wealthy pursue this route? I consider those questions in my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Even if enough people wanted to move to Vermont [the site of the campus for sale], this new university would basically have to re-create the talent pool at other, more established institutions, thus replicating their basic character. If anything, the new school probably would have to hire the malcontents, as they are the most likely to leave their current jobs for a new and untested venture. If you think existing universities have too much infighting and rancor, wait till you see this new project.
You might think that the leaders of the new college could shape and improve the incentives of their faculty. But that isn’t easy. For many talented people, the key incentives are outward-facing — they will be looking to get published and win rewards, prizes and eventually job offers from the outside world. Creating a new institution does not change these basic incentives, for better or worse.
Alternatively, you might try to make their rewards more inward-looking — pay them a big bonus if they contribute to campus life in the right way. But that tends to be expensive and to reward people who are good at gaming the system, again increasing the risk of fractiousness. Nor would it attract academic superstars, who typically excel at marketing themselves to the wider and wealthier outside world.
And:
The issue is how to attract a cluster of talent. Smart people wish to go to Harvard because other smart people go there, and that creates a self-reinforcing dynamic. This is in contrast to the corporate world, where top talent is (sometimes) willing to join risky new ventures because of the financial reward. If you were an early employee at Facebook, for example, you are probably much wealthier now than if you had gone to work for Yahoo or AOL.
In other words, I believe such an enterprise would be doomed to failure. Do read the whole thing.