The Rate of Return to the High/Scope Perry Preschool Program

By James J. Heckman, S. Moon, Rodrigo Pinto, P. Savelyev, Adam Yavitz. Journal of Public Economics, 2010

1,305 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper estimates the rate of return to the High/Scope Perry Preschool Program, an early intervention program targeted toward disadvantaged African-American youth. Estimates of the rate of return to the Perry program are widely cited to support the claim of substantial economic benefits from preschool education programs. Previous studies of the rate of return to this program ignore the compromises that occurred in the randomization protocol. They do not report standard errors. The rates of return estimated in this paper account for these factors. We conduct an extensive analysis of sensitivity to alternative plausible assumptions. Estimated annual social rates of return generally fall between 7–10 percent, with most estimates substantially lower than those previously reported in the literature. However, returns are generally statistically significantly different from zero for both males and females and are above the historical return on equity. Estimated benefit-to-cost ratios support this conclusion.

Subfields: Education, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8b41cb63d5bfdab90824118a63ecf8ef6021c85d

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Citations in the corpus

Birthdays, Schooling, and Crime: Regression-Discontinuity Analysis of School Performance, Delinquency, Dropout, and Crime Initiation (2016, background): “For example, a large share of the social benefit from the Perry Preschool stemmed from the reduction in criminal involvement of the treatment group (Heckman et al. 2010).”
Econometric methods for causal evaluation of education policies and practices: a non‐technical guide (2011, methodology): “For example, Heckman et al. (2010) show that the Perry Preschool Program did not fully reach random assignment, as treatment and control group individuals were reassigned afterwards.5 More generally, controlled experiments often suffer from issues of non-perfect implementation, compromising the…”
Perspectives on Inequality and Opportunity from the Survey of Consumer Finances (2014, background): “…households who get good-quality prekindergarten education are more likely to graduate from high school and attend college as well as hold a job and have higher earnings, and they are less likely to be incarcerated or receive public assistance (see Heckman et al. 2010, and Belfield et al. 2006).”
Human Capital and the Lifetime Costs of Impatience (2015, background): “For pre-school age children, a direct investment in programs that teach children to delay gratification is likely to pay large dividends (Heckman et al. 2010b).”
Evaluating Public Programs with Close Substitutes: The Case of Head Start (2016, methodology): “A standard means of valuing such impacts is in terms of their effects on later life earnings (Heckman et al., 2010a, 2013; Chetty et al., 2011, 2014b).10 Let the symbol B denote the total after-tax lifetime income of a cohort of children.”
Personality, IQ, and Lifetime Earnings (2018, background): “…clear whether igh-IQ children would benefit from improving socio-emotional skills. any socio-emotional-skill building interventions are targeted at disad- antaged, and sometimes low-IQ, populations (s.a. Grossman and Tierey, 1998; Heckman et al., 2010; 2013; University of Chicago Crime ab, 2012 ).”
U.S. High School Graduation Rates: Patterns and Explanations (2013, neutral): “See Heckman et al. (2010) for a summary of benefits from the Perry Preschool program. and primary school years (Reynolds et al. 2011).”