College Choices: The Economics of Where to Go, When to Go, and How to Pay For It

(1977). Education, Occupation, and Earnings: Achievement in the Early Career. The Journal of Higher Education: Vol. 48, No. 6, pp. 718-720.

Education, Occupation, and Earnings: Achievement in the Early Career

We conduct a comparative welfare analysis of 133 historical policy changes over the past half-century in the United States, focusing on policies in social insurance, education and job training, taxes and cash transfers, and in-kind transfers. For each policy, we use existing causal estimates to calculate both the benefit that each policy provides its recipients (measured as their willingness to pay) and the policy’s net cost, inclusive of long-term impacts on the government’s budget. We divide the willingness to pay by the net cost to the government to form each policy’s Marginal Value of Public Funds, or its “MVPF”. Comparing MVPFs across policies provides a unified method of assessing their impact on social welfare. Our results suggest that direct investments in low-income children’s health and education have historically had the highest MVPFs, on average exceeding 5. Many such policies have paid for themselves as governments recouped the cost of their initial expenditures through additional taxes collected and reduced transfers. We find large MVPFs for education and health policies amongst children of all ages, rather than observing diminishing marginal returns throughout childhood. We find smaller MVPFs for policies targeting adults, generally between 0.5 and 2. Expenditures on adults have exceeded this MVPF range in particular if they induced large spillovers on children. We relate our estimates to existing theories of optimal government policy and we discuss how the MVPF provides lessons for the design of future research.

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A Unified Welfare Analysis of Government Policies

In this article, Carola Suarez-Orozco and colleagues investigate how to improve undocumented undergraduate student experiences across a variety of US campuses. The authors draw on a national survey of diverse undocumented undergraduates attending two- and four-year public and private institutions of higher education. Using an ecological framework that accounts for risk and resilience, Suarez-Orozco and colleagues provide insights into the challenges undocumented undergraduates face and the assets they bring as they navigate their educational contexts. The authors also consider the role of campuses in shaping these experiences and make recommendations, based on quantitative data and the perspectives of students, for creating undocufriendly campuses.

Undocumented Undergraduates on College Campuses: Understanding Their Challenges and Assets and What It Takes to Make an Undocufriendly Campus

In the United States, 5.3 million children and adolescents are growing up either with unauthorized status or with at least one parent who has that status. Until recently, little in the way of research has informed federal, state, and local policy debates related to unauthorized status (e.g., border enforcement, deportation, and a pathway to citizenship) although these issues have important implications for youth development. This statement is a brief summary of the research evidence on multiple domains of development that may be affected by the child or parent's unauthorized status. We also describe the contextual and psychological mechanisms that may link this status to developmental outcomes. We summarize a range of policies and practices that could reduce the developmental harm to children, youth, and their families stemming from this status. Finally, we conclude with recommendations for policy, practice, and research that are based on the evidence reviewed.

Unauthorized Status and Youth Development in the United States: Consensus Statement of the Society for Research on Adolescence.

By examining the college attendance patterns of youth who came of age during the Great Recession, our study investigates the economic factors in emerging adulthood that may contribute to the limited upward educational mobility experienced by a contemporary cohort of young adults. Drawing on telephone survey and in-depth interview data gathered from 18- to 26-year-olds, we analyze patterns of stopping out—or leaving college with intentions to return. Our findings demonstrate that financial considerations in emerging adulthood—including receipt of government financial aid, attending to family financial obligations, paying for housing expenses, and rising tuition rates—play a key role in shaping pathways through community and 4-year colleges. We argue that in seeking to understand inequality in educational and labor outcomes, researchers should make conceptual distinctions between financial factors connected to an individual’s family background, and related, but temporally distinct financial issues experienc...

Financial Challenges in Emerging Adulthood and Students’ Decisions to Stop Out of College

We examine the long-term impacts of California's state-based financial aid by tracking educational and labor force outcomes for up to 14 years after high school graduation. We identify program impacts by exploiting variation in eligibility rules using GPA and family income cutoffs that are ex ante unknown to applicants. Aid eligibility increases undergraduate and graduate degree completion, and for some subgroups, raises longer-run annual earnings and the likelihood that young adults reside in California. These findings suggest that the net cost of financial aid programs may frequently be overstated, though our results are too imprecise to provide exact cost-benefit estimates.

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/pdf/doi/10.1257/pol.20170466

The Long-Run Impacts of Financial Aid: Evidence from California's Cal Grant

This paper examines the Oregon Promise, a state‐level program that exclusively subsidizes in‐state community college attendance. I estimate impacts using a difference‐in‐difference design that links students in states with essentially universal 10th‐grade PSAT coverage to national‐level postsecondary enrollment data. I find that the implementation of the Oregon Promise increased enrollment at two‐year colleges by roughly four to five percentage points for the first two eligible cohorts. In the first year of the program, the increase in community college enrollment comes primarily from students shifting out of four‐year colleges, whereas in the second year the program predominately increases overall postsecondary enrollment.

What Does Free Community College Buy? Early Impacts from the Oregon Promise

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The Long Run Impacts of Merit Aid: Evidence from California's Cal Grant. CEPA Working Paper No. 16-13.

Do signals of high aptitude shape the course of collegiate study? We apply a regression discontinuity design to understand how college major choice is impacted by receiving a higher Advanced Placement (AP) integer score, despite similar exam performance, compared to students who received a lower integer score. Attaining higher scores increases the probability that a student majors in that exam subject by approximately 5 percent (0.64 percentage points), with some individual exams demonstrating increases as high as 30 percent. A substantial portion of the overall effect is driven by behavioral responses to the positive signal of receiving a higher score. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

/pdf/shifting-college-majors-in-response-to-advanced-placement-4z5lm8zwgt.pdf

Oded Gurantz

Papers

Financial Challenges in Emerging Adulthood and Students’ Decisions to Stop Out of College

The Long-Run Impacts of Financial Aid: Evidence from California's Cal Grant

What Does Free Community College Buy? Early Impacts from the Oregon Promise

The Long Run Impacts of Merit Aid: Evidence from California's Cal Grant. CEPA Working Paper No. 16-13.

Shifting College Majors in Response to Advanced Placement Exam Scores