Estimating the Return to College Selectivity Over the Career Using Administrative Earning Data

By S. Dale, Alan B. Krueger. Social Science Research Network, 2011

223 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We estimate the monetary return to attending a highly selective college using the College and Beyond (C&B) Survey linked to Detailed Earnings Records from the Social Security Administration (SSA). This paper extends earlier work by Dale and Krueger (2002) that examined the relationship between the college that students attended in 1976 and the earnings they self-reported reported in 1995 on the C&B follow-up survey. In this analysis, we use administrative earnings data to estimate the return to various measures of college selectivity for a more recent cohort of students: those who entered college in 1989. We also estimate the return to college selectivity for the 1976 cohort of students, but over a longer time horizon (from 1983 through 2007) using administrative data. We find that the return to college selectivity is sizeable for both cohorts in regression models that control for variables commonly observed by researchers, such as student high school GPA and SAT scores. However, when we adjust for unobserved student ability by controlling for the average SAT score of the colleges that students applied to, our estimates of the return to college selectivity fall substantially and are generally indistinguishable from zero. There were notable exceptions for certain subgroups. For black and Hispanic students and for students who come from less-educated families (in terms of their parents' education), the estimates of the return to college selectivity remain large, even in models that adjust for unobserved student characteristics.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d0e8cf3899d3e8f103c94f03f3b8120d51219231

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Citations in the corpus

Quantile Treatment Effects of College Quality on Earnings: Evidence from Administrative Data in Texas. NBER Working Paper No. 18068. (2012, unknown): “, whether many peers attend this school) and, in our data, the change in access to flagship universities that accompanied the implementation of the Top Ten Percent Rule in 1998.(18) Due to the detailed set of controls for student academic ability and background we include in our model, we argue thes”
Social and Economic Returns to College Education in the United States (2012, background): “New unpublished work (Dale & Krueger 2011) again questions the return to selectivity.”
Does Attending Elite Colleges Pay in China (2012, methodology): “Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Daniel et al. (1997) find that college quality has a substantially positive impact on young men’s wages.”
Performance-Based Funding in American Higher Education: A Systematic Synthesis of the Intended and Unintended Consequences (2020, unknown): “…for students differ by the type of college attended, and labor market returns are larger for students, especially low-income and underrepresented minority students, who attended a more selective public college or university (S. Dale & Krueger, 2011; S. B. Dale & Krueger, 2002; Hoekstra, 2009).”
An Examination of the Impact of Accelerating Community College Students' Progression through Developmental Education (2014, background): “…related to educational outcomes, such as students’ academic and professional goals and self-assessment of their own academic preparation (dale & krueger, 2011). we also had high school transcript data, which allowed us to control for prior achievement as well as capture unobservable…”
Field of Study, Earnings, and Self-Selection* (2016, unknown): “Dale and Krueger (2002), Black and Smith (2004), Lindahl and Regner (2005), Hamermesh and Donald (2008), and Dale and Krueger (2011) show the difficulty in drawing causal inferences about the payoffs to post-secondary education from observational data.”
Race and Stratification in College Enrollment Over Time (2018, background): “A growing body of research indicates that selective college attendance leads to higher average earnings (Black & Smith, 2004; Hoekstra, 2009; M. Long, 2008), and the largest benefits may accrue to minority and other disadvantaged students (Dale & Krueger, 2011).”
Socioeconomic inequality in access to “high-status” colleges : a cross-country comparison of primary and secondary effects (2015, background): “Conversely, Dale and Krueger (2011) argue that such returns are largely due to selection effects, and that – barring some subgroups (e.g., traditionally disadvantaged students) – there is little economic benefit to attending a more selective university.”
Discrimination in the Credential Society: An Audit Study of Race and College Selectivity in the Labor Market (2015, unknown): “Some research explores racial heterogeneity in the effects of human capital and finds a mix of larger positive effects (Dale and Krueger 2011; Loury and Garman 1995), no differential effects (Long 2010; Monks 2000), or smaller positive effects (Cooper and Cohn 1997) of college selectivity on wages…”