Building the Stock of College-Educated Labor Revisited (original) (raw)
Related papers
Building the Stock of College-Educated Labor
Journal of Human Resources, 2008
Half of college students drop out before completing a degree. These low rates of college completion among young people should be viewed in the context of slow future growth in the educated labor force, as the well-educated baby boomers retire and new workers are drawn from populations with historically low education levels. This paper establishes a causal link between college costs and the share of workers with a college education. I exploit the introduction of two large tuition subsidy programs, finding that they increase the share of the population that completes a college degree by three percentage points. The effects are strongest among women, with white women increasing degree receipt by 3.2 percentage points and the share of nonwhite women attempting or completing any years of college increasing by six and seven percentage points, respectively. A cost-benefit analysis indicates that tuition reduction can be a socially efficient method for increasing college completion. However, even with the offer of free tuition, a large share of students continue to drop out, suggesting that the direct costs of school are not the only impediment to college completion.
Is College Worth the Money? A Look on the Effects of Bachelor's Degrees to the Unemployment Rate
This paper aims to quantify the effect continuing with higher education after high school has on the unemployment rate. Fifty states were used as data points in this analysis to ascertain whether attending college greatly enhanced an individual's probability of being employed. Our hypothesis was that the greater the percentage of bachelor's degrees to the population in a state, the lower that state's unemployment rate would be. Other explanatory variables such as the percentage of people with a graduate degree, the increase in state GDP, the percentage of people with a high school degree, race distribution and median age were factored into the analysis to avoid data bias. Our data analysis shows a noteworthy correlation between the percentage of bachelor's degree holders to the state's unemployment rate-all other factors included.
The Impact of New College Graduates on Intrastate Labor Markets
Journal of Education Finance, 2010
A crucial issue in the debate on state support for higher education is the extent that a state's production of college graduates affects the state's education attainment. The view that many new graduates take their state-supported degrees to labor markets in other states undermines states' incentives to promote wider access to college. This study offers reasons to be skeptical of this view, and develops a simple framework to quantify the intrastate labor-market effects from the production of new college graduates. Data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System and the Current Population Survey are used to quantify the effects of new graduates on states' net migration, employment, unemployment, labor force nonparticipation, and wages of college graduates. The results indicate that a state's production of college graduates has a nearly proportionate impact on the state's college attainment.
In this paper, we examine whether investments in higher education have contributed to changes in occupational inequality by focusing on the impact of college completion rates on movement into desirable occupations between 1983 and 2002. Since forces generating inequality vary by gender, race, and ethnicity, we examine trends for white, black, and Hispanic men and women in our study. Utilizing Ordinary Least Squares Regression on data from 20 Current Population surveys, we find a modest decrease in both gender and racial inequality in access to desirable occupations and an increase in inequality between His- panics and members of the other groups. College com- pletion accounts for the progress made by white women and for the declines among Hispanic men. It does not explain changes for African Americans, either between men and women or when compared to whites.
Is merit-aid for all? The effects of aid-eligibility changes on college access in the United States
Studies in Higher Education, 2023
The United States has widely experimented with merit-based financial aid to make college more accessible and affordable for its youth. Varying in design and benefits, these state-run programs subsidize college costs for academically meritorious high-school graduates. While broadly linked to higher college attendance the distribution of aid benefits depends critically on the eligibility criteria. States often make post-adoption changes to merit requirements to lower program costs, but little is known about their impact on youth’s college decisions. This paper evaluates the effects of such eligibility revisions using West Virginia’s PROMISE scholarship, which, unlike its peers, frequently hardened merit rules post-inception. We leverage the discontinuities in the timing of the scholarship’s adoption and its successive modifications to estimate the policy-induced changes in students’ college choice. We use two robust inference models – difference-in-difference and synthetic control, on institution-level enrollment data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Systems (IPEDS). We estimate a 6.5% growth in college enrollments immediately following PROMISE that fades rapidly once aid eligibility narrows. We find that this initial enrollment jump is attributable to an aid-induced improvement in the average youth’s college readiness which is confined to the high achievers after the program scope narrows. Additionally, enrollments shift from 4-year to 2-year colleges post eligibility revisions. Our results show that the stiffer criteria redirect the aid benefits toward youth with already better access to college.
Trade in university training: Cross state variation in the production and use of college educated la
2000
The main question addressed in this analysis is how the production of undergraduate and graduate education at the state level affects the local stock of university-educated workers. The potential mobility of highly skilled workers implies that the number of college students graduating in an area need not affect the number of college graduates living in the area. However, the production of relatively large numbers of college and university graduates in an area may lead to increases in the employment of universitytrained manpower if local industries expand production of goods that use college-educated workers intensively. Using data from the U.S., we find a modest link between the production and use of BA degree recipients; states awarding relatively large numbers of BA degrees in each cohort also have somewhat higher concentrations of college-educated workers.
Sociology of Education, 2012
In the decades following World War II, a significant expansion of community colleges occurred throughout the United States. As the baby boom generation came of age, demand for higher education spiked, and policy makers allocated the requisite funding to expand institutions of higher education. This expansion, including vigorous funding from federal, state, and local units of government, was politically popular. This openhanded support ended in the latter decades of the twentieth century as hostility to paying taxes and to public spending mounted. In recent decades, community colleges have competed with other social expenditures, such as prisons and health care demands, for scarce public resources. And, in a number of states, community colleges have fared poorly in this competition. Using multivariate analyses and data gathered from several sources, including the American Association of Community Colleges, the authors examine the impacts of community colleges on local employment trends. Their research focuses on rural counties over four time periods between 1976 and 2004. This focus is important, as rural areas have faced severe and chronic economic decline over the study period. Their research (specifically for the 1976-1983 and 1991-1997 panels) provides evidence that established community colleges made a significant contribution to employment growth. However, for the most recent panel (i.e., 1998-2004), the coefficient for community colleges is negative. An examination of the interaction between community colleges and states' fiscal contexts provides evidence that this decline may be the result of states cutting back their funding levels for community colleges.