Access to 4-Year Public Colleges and Degree Completion

By Joshua Goodman, Michael Hurwitz, Jonathan Smith. Journal of Labor Economics, 2017

114 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Does access to 4-year colleges affect degree completion for students who would otherwise attend 2-year colleges? Admission to Georgia’s 4-year public sector requires minimum SAT scores. Regression discontinuity estimates show that access to this sector increases 4-year college enrollment and college quality, largely by diverting students from 2-year colleges. Access substantially increases bachelor’s degree completion rates for these relatively low-skilled students. SAT-retaking behavior suggests students value access to 4-year public colleges, though perhaps less than they should. Our results imply that absolute college quality matters more than match quality, and they suggest potential unintended consequences of free community college proposals.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fb85eb69a3b36ced48b1f98e313c1931689703f7

Citations in the corpus

• Race and Stratification in College Enrollment Over Time (2018, unknown): “…is related to the probability of completion both overall and for academically marginal and racial-minority students (Cohodes & Goodman, 2014; Goodman, Hurwitz, & Smith, 2017; Kurlaender, Carrell, & Jackson, 2016; B. Long & Kurlaender, 2009; Melguizo, 2006; Smith & Stange, 2015), and the…”
• Community Colleges and Upward Mobility (2019, unknown): “A handful of recent papers exploit natural experiments that directly or indirectly influence 2-year college enrollment (Denning, 2017; Zimmerman, 2014; Goodman et al., 2017), but these papers do 7National Conference of State Legislatures (2016).”