Current estimates of the contribution of education to economic growth have been questioned because they ignore the interaction of education with ability. Whether the neglect of ability differences in the analyses of the income-education relationship results in estimates that are too high was considered in an earlier paper by one of the authors (Griliches 1970), and a negative answer was conjectured. In this paper, we pursue this question a bit further, using a new and larger body of data. Unfortunately, a definitive answer to this question is hampered both by the vagueness and elasticity of "education" and "ability" as analytical concepts and by the lack of data on early (preschooling) intelligence. The data examined in this paper are based on a 1964 sample of U.S. military veterans. The variables measured include scores on a mental ability test, indicators of parental status, region of residence while growing up, school years completed before service, and school years completed during or after service. These have allowed us to inquire into the separate effects of parental background, intelligence, and schooling. The basic problem and analytical framework can be set out very simply. Let income be a linear function of education and ability, or, Y a + P1E + P(2G + u, where Y is income, E is education, G is ability,

Education, Income, and Ability

Between 1965 and 1975 the enrollment rate of college-age men in the United States rose and then fell abruptly. Many contemporary observers (e.g., James Davis and Kenneth Dolbeare, 1968) attributed the surge in college attendance to draft-avoidance behavior. Under a policy first introduced in the Korean War, the Selective Service issued college deferments to enrolled men that delayed their eligibility for conscription. These deferments provided a strong incentive to remain in school for men who wanted to avoid the draft. For example, the college entry rate of young men rose from 54 percent in 1963 to 62 percent in 1968 (the peak year of the draft). Moreover, both the college entry rate and the number of inductions dropped sharply between 1968 and 1973 as the draft was being phased out. Although these parallel trends are suggestive, they do not necessarily prove that draft avoidance raised the education of men who were at risk of service during the Vietnam War. Such an inference requires an explicit specification of the “counterfactual”: What would have happened to schooling outcomes in the absence of the draft? In this paper we use trends in enrollment and completed schooling of men relative to those of women to measure the effects of draftavoidance behavior during the Vietnam War. Our maintained hypothesis is that, in the absence of gender-specific factors such as the draft, the relative schooling outcomes of men and women from the same cohort would follow a smooth trend. In light of the sharp discontinuity in military induction rates between 1965 and 1970, we look for similar patterns in the relative enrollment rate of men, and in the relative college graduation rate of men from cohorts that were at risk of induction during this period.

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Going to College to Avoid the Draft: The Unintended Legacy of the Vietnam War

We examine the causal effect of education on migration using variation in college attainment due to draft-avoidance behavior during the Vietnam War. We use national and state-level induction risk to identify both college attainment and veteran status for men observed in the 1980 Census. 2SLS estimates imply that additional years of college significantly increased the likelihood that affected men resided outside their birth states later in life. Most of our estimates suggest a causal impact of higher education on migration that is larger in magnitude but not significantly different from the OLS estimates.

The Impact of College on Migration: Evidence from the Vietnam Generation

The effect of college education on mortality.

The authors, by reviewing the recent work of several behavioral and social science disciplines concerned with the impact of war upon society, suggest that the study of war’s social ramifications has been characterized by the publication of empirical work that neglects, to some extent, the larger sociological implications of war as well as its ability to reorder society. The work published over the last two decades and reviewed here was written in the United States in the wake of the Vietnam conflict. This work has examined the implications of military manpower recruitment and training, as well as the psychological and economic implications of wartime service. The immediacy of this conflict, however, may have deterred sociological analysts from systematically examining the macroscopic implications of social change, a void that is remedied, in part, by historical and literary analyses that consider the long-range impacts of past wars on their belligerent societies. Finally, the authors propose that the stud...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2083341.pdf

Katherine A. Hinckley

Papers

Little Groups of Neighbors: The Selective Service System. Selective Service: Conflict and Compromise