Who benefits most from college? Evidence for negative selection in heterogeneous economic returns to higher education

By Jennie E. Brand, Yu Xie. American Sociological Review, 2010

645 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this article, we consider how the economic return to a college education varies across members of the U.S. population. Based on principles of comparative advantage, scholars commonly presume that positive selection is at work, that is, individuals who are most likely to select into college also benefit most from college. Net of observed economic and noneconomic factors influencing college attendance, we conjecture that individuals who are least likely to obtain a college education benefit the most from college. We call this theory the negative selection hypothesis. To adjudicate between the two hypotheses, we study the effects of completing college on earnings by propensity score strata using an innovative hierarchical linear model with data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. For both cohorts, for both men and women, and for every observed stage of the life course, we find evidence suggesting negative selection. Results from auxiliary analyses lend further support to the negative selection hypothesis.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/04c7bc1ebaa8159b2f654d9864d48ab46927678b

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Citations in the corpus

6. A Diagnostic Routine for the Detection of Consequential Heterogeneity of Causal Effects (2008, neutral): “…is not a substantial financial sacrifice, 18For an alternative example, which lines up nicely with the positive selection example just given, see Brand and Xie (2007). even students who are not likely to benefit from attending Catholic schooling instead of public schooling may enroll in…”
The Demand for Effective Charter Schools (2018, positive): “These possibilities are consistent with a growing body of evidence suggesting that lowerincome students are less likely to choose high-quality schools in a variety of settings (Hastings et al. 2006; Brand and Xie 2010; Hoxby and Avery 2012; Butler et al. 2013; Dillon and Smith 2017).”
Social and Economic Returns to College Education in the United States (2012, methodology): “Brand & Xie (2010) used two American data sets to make matches and estimate the effect of education this way.”
An Examination of the (Un)Intended Consequences of Performance Funding in Higher Education (2017, positive): “…would concur with Mettler’s finding that the least advantaged among us are the ones who would benefit most from higher education (see, for example, Brand & Xie, 2010) What Mettler (2002) referred to as “policy feedback effects” are also referred to as “feed-forward effects” (Schneider & Sidney,…”
The Medium-Term Labor Market Returns to Community College Awards: Evidence From North Carolina (2014, background): “…on the extent of omitted variable bias, or whether observed earnings premiums are actually a return to unobserved characteristics (Arcidiacono, 2004; Brand & Xie, 2010), and the extent of selection or endogeneity bias, or whether earnings are conditional on unobservable factors influencing…”
The Price of Opportunity: Race, Student Loan Debt, and College Achievement (2013, background): “Brand and Xie (2010) also recently advanced a “negative selection hypothesis” that argues disadvantaged groups have the most to gain from getting a degree because they have less human, cultural, and social capital to compensate for a lack of college credentials.”
Equalization or Selection? Reassessing the “Meritocratic Power” of a College Degree in Intergenerational Income Mobility (2019, background): “Brand and Xie (2010) focus on how economic returns to college vary according to the propensity score of college graduation.”