Philosophers and welders
The Value of Postsecondary Credentials in the Labor Market: An Experimental Study
David Deming et al.
American Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study employers' perceptions of the value of postsecondary degrees using a field experiment. We randomly assign the sector and selectivity of institutions to fictitious resumes and apply to real vacancy postings for business and health jobs on a large online job board. We find that a business bachelor's degree from a for-profit "online" institution is 22 percent less likely to receive a callback than one from a nonselective public institution. In applications to health jobs, we find that for-profit credentials receive fewer callbacks unless the job requires an external quality indicator such as an occupational license.
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The Long-Run Effects of Universal Pre-K on Criminal Activity
Alexander Smith
U.S. Military Academy Working Paper, September 2015
Abstract:
While Pre-K enrollment has expanded rapidly over the last decade, there is little evidence to date regarding the long-run effects of statewide universal preschool programs, only studies of programs targeted at more at-risk populations (e.g. Head Start and Perry Preschool) that are often more resource-intensive. I estimate the impact of Oklahoma’s universal prekindergarten program (UPK) on later criminal activity, an outcome that accounted for 40-65% of the large estimated long-run benefits of Perry Preschool. I assemble data on criminal charges in the state of Oklahoma and identify the effect of UPK availability using a regression discontinuity design that leverages the birthdate cutoff for UPK in the program’s first year of implementation. I find significant negative impacts of UPK availability on the likelihood that black children are later charged with a crime at age 18 or 19 of 7 percentage points for misdemeanors and 5 percentage points for felonies. I find no impact on the likelihood of later charges for white children. The results suggest that universal Pre-K can, like more targeted programs, have dramatic effects on later criminal outcomes, but these effects are concentrated among more at-risk populations.
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State appropriations and undergraduate borrowing: More debt, less money
Samuel Raisanen & Kathryn Birkeland
Applied Economics Letters, forthcoming
Abstract:
When state appropriations decrease, public universities respond by raising tuition. Students borrow more in response to both tuition increases and appropriation cuts. This article investigates the feedback of how borrowing and tuition influence state appropriations. Using a panel data set of 450 four-year public universities from 1999 to 2012, we employ three-stage least squares techniques to control for the endogeneity between state appropriations, tuition and student borrowing. There is evidence that state policy-makers respond to increases in university tuition and student borrowing by decreasing future appropriation levels. After controlling for the effect of appropriations on tuition and borrowing, a one-dollar increase in student borrowing reduces state appropriations per student by $0.06, and a one-dollar increase in tuition results in a decrease of $0.45 in state appropriations per student. When universities increase tuition for reasons other than a reduction in state appropriations, policy-makers respond with a significant cut in future appropriations which could signal an incentive strategy.
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Research Design Meets Market Design: Using Centralized Assignment for Impact Evaluation
Atila Abdulkadiroglu et al.
NBER Working Paper, November 2015
Abstract:
A growing number of school districts use centralized assignment mechanisms to allocate school seats in a manner that reflects student preferences and school priorities. Many of these assignment schemes use lotteries to ration seats when schools are oversubscribed. The resulting random assignment opens the door to credible quasi-experimental research designs for the evaluation of school effectiveness. Yet the question of how best to separate the lottery-generated variation integral to such designs from non-random preferences and priorities remains open. This paper develops easily-implemented empirical strategies that fully exploit the random assignment embedded in the widely-used deferred acceptance mechanism and its variants. We use these methods to evaluate charter schools in Denver, one of a growing number of districts that integrate charter and traditional public schools in a unified assignment system. The resulting estimates show large achievement gains from charter school attendance. Our approach expands the scope for impact evaluation by maximizing the number of students and schools that can be studied using random assignment. We also show how to use DA to identify causal effects in models with multiple school sectors.
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Left Behind? Citizen Responsiveness to Government Performance Information
John Holbein
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do citizens respond to policy-based information signals about government performance? Using multiple big datasets — which link for the first time large-scale school administrative records and individual validated voting behavior — I show that citizens react to exogenous school failure signals provided by No Child Left Behind. These signals cause a noticeable increase in turnout in local school board elections and increase the competitiveness of these races. Additionally, I present evidence that school failure signals cause citizens to vote with their feet by exiting failing schools: suggesting that exit plays an underexplored role in democratic accountability. However, performance signals elicit a response unequally, with failure primarily mobilizing high propensity citizens and encouraging exit among those who are white, affluent, and more likely to vote. Hence, while performance signals spur a response, they do so only for a select few, leaving many others behind.
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The Gift of Time? School Starting Age and Mental Health
Thomas Dee & Hans Henrik Sievertsen
NBER Working Paper, October 2015
Abstract:
In many developed countries, children now begin their formal schooling at an older age. However, a growing body of empirical studies provides little evidence that such schooling delays improve educational and economic outcomes. This study presents new evidence on whether school starting age influences student outcomes by relying on linked Danish survey and register data that include several distinct, widely used, and validated measures of mental health that are reported out-of-school among similarly aged children. We estimate the causal effects of delayed school enrollment using a "fuzzy" regression-discontinuity design based on exact dates of birth and the fact that, in Denmark, children typically enroll in school during the calendar year in which they turn six. We find that a one-year delay in the start of school dramatically reduces inattention/hyperactivity at age 7 (effect size = -0.7), a measure of self regulation with strong negative links to student achievement. We also find that this large and targeted effect persists at age 11. However, the estimated effects of school starting age on other mental-health constructs, which have weaker links to subsequent student achievement, are smaller and less persistent.
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A Quality-Preserving Increase in Four-Year College Attendance
Robert Archibald, David Feldman & Peter McHenry
Journal of Human Capital, Fall 2015, Pages 265-297
Abstract:
We use the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 and the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 data sets to evaluate changes in the college matching process. Rising attendance rates at 4-year institutions have not decreased average preparedness of college goers or of college graduates, and further attendance gains are possible before diminishing returns set in. We use multinomial logit models to demonstrate that measures of likely success (grade point average) became more predictive of college attendance over time, while other student characteristics such as race and parents’ education became less predictive. Our evidence suggests that schools have become better at sorting while students have efficiently responded to changes in the return to higher education.
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Steven Levitt & Ming-Jen Lin
NBER Working Paper, October 2015
Abstract:
We develop a simple algorithm for detecting exam cheating between students who copy off one another’s exam. When this algorithm is applied to exams in a general science course at a top university, we find strong evidence of cheating by at least 10 percent of the students. Students studying together cannot explain our findings. Matching incorrect answers prove to be a stronger indicator of cheating than matching correct answers. When seating locations are randomly assigned, and monitoring is increased, cheating virtually disappears.
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How Well Aligned Are Textbooks to the Common Core Standards in Mathematics?
Morgan Polikoff
American Educational Research Journal, December 2015, Pages 1185-1211
Abstract:
Research has identified a number of problems limiting the implementation of content standards in the classroom. Curriculum materials may be among the most important influences on teachers’ instruction. As new standards roll out, there is skepticism about the alignment of “Common Core–aligned” curriculum materials to the standards. This analysis is the first to investigate claims of alignment in the context of fourth-grade mathematics using the only widely used alignment tool capable of estimating the alignment of curriculum materials with the standards. The results indicate substantial areas of misalignment; in particular, the textbooks studied systematically overemphasize procedures and memorization relative to the standards, among other weaknesses. The findings challenge publishers’ alignment claims and motivate further research on curriculum alignment.
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Ignorance Is Bliss: Information Sources and Attitudes About School Choices in New Orleans
Celeste Lay
Urban Affairs Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans eliminated default neighborhood schools and began to require parents to choose a school for their child. There are many new schools and a new enrollment process, making accurate and comprehensive information essential. Is one’s information source related to satisfaction in their choices? Psychological theories suggest that more information may not always be better; people can be overwhelmed and actually make suboptimal choices. I show that a greater reliance on comprehensive sources is related to less confidence that one’s child got into their top choice school, while those parents who use shortcuts, such as social networks and/or school advertising, are more satisfied that they made the right choice. Information sources are not, however, related to the likelihood of enrolling one’s child in a high performing school. Rather, the school performance score is predicted by race and socioeconomic class.
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Evaluating Public Programs with Close Substitutes: The Case of Head Start
Patrick Kline & Christopher Walters
NBER Working Paper, October 2015
Abstract:
This paper empirically evaluates the cost-effectiveness of Head Start, the largest early-childhood education program in the United States. Using data from the Head Start Impact Study (HSIS), we show that Head Start draws roughly a third of its participants from competing preschool programs that receive public funds. This both attenuates measured experimental impacts on test scores and reduces the program's net budgetary costs. A calibration exercise indicates that accounting for the public savings associated with reduced enrollment in other subsidized preschools substantially increases estimates of Head Start's rate of return, defined as the after-tax lifetime earnings generated by an extra dollar of public spending. Control function estimation of a semi-parametric selection model reveals substantial heterogeneity in Head Start's test score impacts with respect to counterfactual care alternatives as well as observed and unobserved child characteristics. Head Start is about as effective at raising test scores as competing preschools and its impacts are greater on children from families less likely to participate in the program. Expanding Head Start to new populations is therefore likely to boost the program's rate of return, provided that the proposed technology for increasing enrollment is not too costly.
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What makes education positional? Institutions, overeducation and the competition for jobs
Valentina Di Stasio, Thijs Bol & Herman Van de Werfhorst
Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, forthcoming
Abstract:
We compare three theoretical models for the relationship between schooling and labor market outcomes. On the one hand, the job competition model, which views education as a positional good with relative value on the labor market; on the other hand, the human capital and the social closure models, which view the value of education as absolute but differ in their expectations about returns to years of education above what required for the job. We analyze European countries using data from the European Social Survey (2010), and investigate the incidence of overeducation and the returns to years of overeducation in order to distinguish between the three theoretical models. We then relate these theoretical perspectives to institutions of the education system and of labor market coordination. Our empirical results indicate that education is more likely to function as a positional good in countries with weakly developed vocational education systems, where individuals have an incentive to acquire higher levels of education in order to stay ahead of the labor queue. However, no convincing support was found for the relationship we hypothesized between wage coordination and returns to years of overeducation.
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Jonathan Smith & Kevin Stange
NBER Working Paper, October 2015
Abstract:
Students starting at a two-year college are much less likely to graduate with a college degree than similar students who start at a four-year college but the sources of this attainment gap are largely unexplained. In this paper we simultaneously investigate the attainment consequences of sector choice and peer quality among over 3 million recent high school graduates. This analysis is enabled by data on all PSAT test-takers between 2004 and 2006 from which we develop a novel measure of peer ability for most two-year and four-year colleges in the United States - the average PSAT of enrolled students. We document substantial variation in average peer quality at two-year colleges across and within states and non-trivial overlap across sectors, neither of which has previously been documented. We find that half the gap in bachelor’s attainment rates between students who start at two-year versus four-year institutions is explained by differences in peers, leaving room for structural barriers to transferring between institutions to also play an important role. Also, having better peers is associated with higher attainment in both sectors, though its effects are quite a bit larger in the four-year sector. Thus, the allocation of students between and within sectors, some of which is driven by state policy decisions, has important consequences for the educational attainment of the nation’s workforce.
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What about the Non-Completers? The Labor Market Returns to Progress in Community College
Clive Belfield, Marc Scott & Matthew Zeidenberg
Economics of Education Review, December 2015, Pages 142–156
Abstract:
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.
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Math at home adds up to achievement in school
Talia Berkowitz et al.
Science, 9 October 2015, Pages 196-198
Abstract:
With a randomized field experiment of 587 first-graders, we tested an educational intervention designed to promote interactions between children and parents relating to math. We predicted that increasing math activities at home would increase children’s math achievement at school. We tested this prediction by having children engage in math story time with their parents. The intervention, short numerical story problems delivered through an iPad app, significantly increased children’s math achievement across the school year compared to a reading (control) group, especially for children whose parents are habitually anxious about math. Brief, high-quality parent-child interactions about math at home help break the intergenerational cycle of low math achievement.
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The Returns to Higher Education for Marginal Students: Evidence from Colorado Welfare Recipients
Lesley Turner
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
I estimate the impact of community college credits and credentials on the labor market outcomes of several cohorts of current and former welfare recipients. Using an individual fixed effects approach, I find that women who attend college after entering welfare experience large and significant earnings gains. These returns are driven by credential receipt and when sub-associate’s degree credentials are unobservable, positive earnings gains will be inappropriately attributed to college attendance alone.
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Intended College Attendance: Evidence from an Experiment on College Returns and Costs
Zachary Bleemer & Basit Zafar
Federal Reserve Working Paper, September 2015
Abstract:
Despite a robust college premium, college attendance rates in the United States have remained stagnant and exhibit a substantial socioeconomic gradient. We focus on information gaps — specifically, incomplete information about college benefits and costs — as a potential explanation for these patterns. For this purpose, we conduct an information experiment about college returns and costs embedded within a representative survey of U.S. household heads. We show that, at the baseline, perceptions of college costs and benefits are severely and systematically biased: 75 percent of our respondents underestimate college returns (defined as the average earnings of a college graduate relative to a non-college worker in the population), while 61 percent report net public college costs that exceed actual net costs. There is also substantial heterogeneity in beliefs, with evidence of larger biases among lower-income and non-college households. We also elicit respondents’ intended likelihood of their pre-college-age children attending college, and the likelihood of respondents recommending college for a friend’s child, the two main behavioral outcomes of interest. Respondents are then randomly exposed to one of two information treatments, which respectively provide objective information about “college returns” and “college costs.” We find a significant impact on intended college attendance for individuals in the returns experiment: intended college attendance expectations increase by about 0.2 of the standard deviation in the baseline likelihood. Importantly, as a result of the college returns information intervention, gaps in intended college attendance by household income or parents’ education persist but decline by 20 to 30 percent. Notably, the effect of information persists in the medium-term, two months after the intervention. We find, however, no impact of the cost information treatment on college attendance expectations.
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Housing Booms and Busts, Labor Market Opportunities, and College Attendance
Kerwin Kofi Charles, Erik Hurst & Matthew Notowidigdo
NBER Working Paper, September 2015
Abstract:
We study how the recent national housing boom and bust affected college enrollment and attainment during the 2000s. We exploit cross-city variation in local housing booms, and use a variety of data sources and empirical methods, including models that use plausibly exogenous variation in housing demand identified by sharp structural breaks in local housing prices. We show that the housing boom improved labor market opportunities for young men and women, thereby raising their opportunity cost of college-going. According to standard human capital theories, this effect should have reduced college-going overall, but especially for persons at the margin of attendance. We find that the boom substantially lowered college enrollment and attainment for both young men and women, with the effects concentrated at two-year colleges. We find that the positive employment and wage effects of the boom were generally undone during the bust. However, attainment for the particular cohorts of college-going age during the housing boom remain persistently low after the end of the bust, suggesting that reduced educational attainment may be an enduring effect of the housing cycle. We estimate that the housing boom explains roughly 30 percent of the recent slowdown in college attainment.
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Maximilian Schmeiser, Christiana Stoddard & Carly Urban
Federal Reserve Working Paper, September 2015
Abstract:
The rising incidence and amount of student loan debt among young adults has significant implications for their economic well-being. However, students are generally provided little information on how to finance postsecondary education and how much to borrow. This paper studies how information can change student loan behavior among college students. We exploit a natural experiment across two large public colleges in which some students at one institution above a specific loan amount received "Know Your Debt" letters with information about their student loan debt, suggestions on how to manage their debt, and incentivized offers for one-on-one financial counseling, while the remainder did not. Using a difference-in-difference-in-difference strategy and a rich administrative dataset on individual-level academic records and financial aid packages, we find that students receiving the letters borrow an average of $1,360 less in the subsequent semester -- a reduction of one-third. This reduction in borrowing does not adversely affect academic performance. In fact, those who receive the intervention take more credits and have higher GPAs in the subsequent semester.
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Achievement Effects of Individual Performance Incentives in a Teacher Merit Pay Tournament
Margaret Brehm, Scott Imberman & Michael Lovenheim
NBER Working Paper, September 2015
Abstract:
This paper estimates the effect of the individual incentives teachers face in a teacher-based value-added merit pay tournament on student achievement. We first build an illustrative model in which teachers use proximity to an award threshold to update their information about their own ability, which informs their expected marginal return to effort. The model predicts that those who are closer to an award cutoff in a given year will increase effort and thus will have higher achievement gains in the subsequent year. However, if value-added scores are too noisy, teachers will not respond. Using administrative teacher-student linked data, we test this prediction employing a method akin to the bunching estimator of Saez (2010). Specifically, we examine whether teachers who are proximal to a cutoff in one year exhibit excess gains in test score growth in the next year. Our results show consistent evidence that teachers do not respond to the incentives they face under this program. In line with our model, we argue that a likely reason for the lack of responsiveness is that the value-added measures used to determine awards were too noisy to provide informative feedback about one's ability. This highlights the importance of value-added precision in the design of incentive pay systems.
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Classroom Age Composition and the School Readiness of 3- and 4-Year-Olds in the Head Start Program
Arya Ansari, Kelly Purtell & Elizabeth Gershoff
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The federal Head Start program, designed to improve the school readiness of children from low-income families, often serves 3- and 4-year-olds in the same classrooms. Given the developmental differences between 3- and 4-year-olds, it is unknown whether educating them together in the same classrooms benefits one group, both, or neither. Using data from the Family and Child Experiences Survey 2009 cohort, this study used a peer-effects framework to examine the associations between mixed-age classrooms and the school readiness of a nationally representative sample of newly enrolled 3-year-olds (n = 1,644) and 4-year-olds (n = 1,185) in the Head Start program. Results revealed that 4-year-olds displayed fewer gains in academic skills during the preschool year when they were enrolled in classrooms with more 3-year-olds; effect sizes corresponded to 4 to 5 months of academic development. In contrast, classroom age composition was not consistently associated with 3-year-olds’ school readiness.
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Daniel Hungerman & Kevin Rinz
NBER Working Paper, October 2015
Abstract:
Using a new dataset constructed from nonprofit tax-returns, this paper explores how vouchers and other large-scale programs subsidizing private school attendance have affected the fiscal outcomes of private schools and the affordability of a private education. We find that subsidy programs created a large transfer of public funding to private schools, suggesting that every dollar of funding increased revenue by a dollar or more. Turning to the incidence of subsidies and the impact of subsidies on enrollment, our findings depend on the type of program introduced, with programs restricting eligibility to certain groups of students creating relatively large enrollment gains and small price increases compared to unrestricted programs. We calculate elasticities of demand and supply for private schools, and discuss welfare effects.
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Karen Bierman et al.
Child Development, November/December 2015, Pages 1877–1891
Abstract:
Head Start enhances school readiness during preschool, but effects diminish after children transition into kindergarten. Designed to promote sustained gains, the Research-based Developmentally Informed (REDI) Parent program (REDI-P) provided home visits before and after the kindergarten transition, giving parents evidence-based learning games, interactive stories, and guided pretend play to use with their children. To evaluate impact, two hundred 4-year-old children in Head Start REDI classrooms were randomly assigned to REDI-P or a comparison condition (mail-home math games). Beyond the effects of the classroom program, REDI-P promoted significant improvements in child literacy skills, academic performance, self-directed learning, and social competence, demonstrating the utility of the approach in promoting gains in cognitive and social-emotional skills evident after the transition into kindergarten.
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Brooks Depro & Kathryn Rouse
Economics of Education Review, December 2015, Pages 157–171
Abstract:
Multi-track year-round school calendars allow a school to make continual use of its building over a calendar year by rotating students on separate tracks. Homeowners may a have a preference or distaste for year-round calendars for a variety of reasons, ranging from perceived academic effects to family home and work life disruptions. If households do favor one school calendar relative to another, they may have to pay an additional amount to move to a house with a different calendar. In this paper, we test this possibility. We exploit a natural experiment setting to examine how multi-track year-round calendars influence Wake County, NC residential housing prices. School assignment zone and school fixed effects are included to control for unobserved neighborhood and school characteristics that might be correlated with year-round calendars and housing prices. Our preferred estimates suggest year-round calendars are associated with a statistically significant price penalty of between one and a half to two percent.
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School Segregation, Charter Schools, and Access to Quality Education
John Logan & Julia Burdick-Will
Journal of Urban Affairs, forthcoming
Abstract:
Race, class, neighborhood, and school quality are all highly interrelated in the U.S. educational system. In the last decade a new factor has come into play, the option of attending a charter school. We offer a comprehensive analysis of the disparities among public schools attended by white, black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American children in 2010–2011, including all districts in which charter schools existed. We compare schools in terms of poverty concentration, racial composition, and standardized test scores, and we also examine how attending a charter or non-charter school affects these differences. Black and Hispanic (and to a lesser extent Native American and Asian) students attend elementary and high schools with higher rates of poverty than white students. Especially for whites and Asians, attending a charter school means lower exposure to poverty. Children's own race and the poverty and charter status of their schools affect the test scores and racial isolation of schools that children attend in complex combinations. Most intriguing, attending a charter school means attending a better-performing school in high-poverty areas but a lower performing school in low-poverty areas. Yet even in the best case the positive effect of attending a charter school only slightly offsets the disadvantages of black and Hispanic students.
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Do Charter Schools Crowd Out Private School Enrollment? Evidence from Michigan
Rajashri Chakrabarti & Joydeep Roy
Journal of Urban Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Charter schools have been one of the most important dimensions of recent school reform measures in the United States. Though there have been numerous studies on the effects of charter schools, these have mostly been confined to analyzing their effects on student achievement, student demographic composition, parental satisfaction, and the competitive effects on traditional public schools. This study departs from the existing literature by investigating the effect of charter schools on enrollment in private schools. To investigate this issue empirically, we focus on the state of Michigan where there was a significant spread of charter schools in the nineties. Using data on private school enrollment from biennial NCES private school surveys, and using a fixed effects as well as an instrumental variables strategy that exploits exogenous variation from Michigan charter law, we investigate the effect of charter school penetration on private school enrollment. We do not find any causal evidence that charter schools led to a decline in enrollment in the private schools. Further, we do not find evidence that enrollments in Catholic or other religious schools were affected differently from those in non-religious private schools. Our results are robust to a variety of sensitivity checks.
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Applicant Extracurricular Involvement Predicts Creativity Better Than Traditional Admissions Factors
Katherine Cotter, Jean Pretz & James Kaufman
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, forthcoming
Abstract:
Researchers are challenging college admissions to shift practices to become more inclusive and to consider a range of abilities, including creativity. Admissions counselors must examine limited information and then maximize what they learn. How can admissions counselors use existing data to identify creative students? Research suggests that creative individuals tend to be more involved in extracurricular activities and that those involved in creative activities tend to be more involved in extracurricular activities overall. We expected that extracurricular involvement would predict creativity better than traditional admissions factors alone. Participants were 232 applicants to an undergraduate program recruited by the admissions office who completed online supplements. Data on SAT scores, high school rank, and extracurricular involvement were obtained from admissions files. Creativity was measured through a divergent thinking task, a self-assessment, a rated photo caption, and a rated essay about a student’s dream project. Involvement in art clubs significantly predicted caption creativity, explaining twice as much variance as traditional factors alone. Arts club membership, but not traditional admissions factors, explained a significant amount of variance in self-reported performance creativity (i.e., writing, acting, music, etc.). Curiously, intensity of participation in academic clubs was negatively related to divergent thinking creativity. These findings demonstrate that extracurricular activities reveal valuable information about applicants’ creativity that traditional admission factors do not.