The Dale and Krueger study, since replicated, essentially said that if a person has the stats to be competitive for a highly rejective school, that they are just as likely to be successful whether they attend or not.
They said the exception are FGLI students. They are likely to get a bump in success potential if they do indeed attend a highly rejective school.
It’s because students who aren’t first generation, low income, have built in family support mechanisms that FGLI students don’t. Thus, as alluded to before, their cake is already baked.
My impression is this metric was a way to drill into federal data to find something meaningful to fgli students.
I am examining my own assumptions about college education, non monetary benefits of study, meeting similarly inclined people.
I also found interesting study by St. Louis Fed, but it is not limited to fgli students.
The Skill Sets Behind Higher Earnings
The rates of return shown in Table 2 were calculated from data collected on the earnings of college-educated workers. However, it is possible that college-educated workers have skills—ones they had even before attending college—that make them simultaneously better at earning high incomes and more likely to pursue a degree. The question here is are people more highly skilled because they went to college or are highly skilled people simply more likely to go to college?4 It’s difficult to tell the difference, so this may cause the rate of return on a college degree to be overestimated.
And there is a discussion by Brookings of a federal effort to identify “low-financial-value” higher education programs.
““low-financial-value” higher education programs. The Department hopes the list will highlight programs that do not provide substantial financial benefits to students relative to the costs incurred, in hopes of (1) steering students away from those programs and (2) applying pressure on institutions on the list to improve the value of those programs—either on the cost or the benefit side.”
And this study sponsored bt the College Board from 2004,
framing higher education as a public good, not just a private investment, also caught my attention.
“ But perhaps its more significant contribution to the dialogue is, as the co-author Sandy Baum puts it, the quantification of non-monetary benefits. To that end, “Education Pays: The Benefits of Higher Education for Individuals and Society,” can be seen as part of a growing campaign to frame higher education as not only a private investment but as a public good.
The report, a follow-up to the original 2004 publication that included many of the same indicators, uses data from the Department of Education, the U.S. Census Bureau and surveys by other higher education groups. One of its main assertions (also backed by plenty of data): College graduates are more engaged citizens and make healthier decisions than those who don’t earn a diploma. Thus, the report argues, higher education has a high rate of return for society. A more educated work force means greater tax revenue and a stronger democracy.
“A lot of civic benefits are network benefits,” said Suzanne Morse, president of the Pew Partnership for Civic Change, who participated in a College Board panel Wednesday on Capitol Hill. “Your ability to communicate well is more important when the rest of your community can communicate well.”
As is common for a report that measures civic engagement, “Education Pays” reviews recent data on voting – in this case from the 2004 presidential election. In every age category, college graduates cast ballots at a higher rate than those who didn’t receive a diploma. The trend is particularly pronounced for the 25- to 44-year-old group, in which 76 percent of college graduates voted, compared with 49 percent of high school graduates.
Rates of voluntarism also rise with education level. Forty-three percent of those surveyed with at least a bachelor’s degree said they volunteered in 2006, and they reported doing so for a median of 55 hours. Fewer than 20 percent of high school graduates reported volunteering, and the median for them was 52 hours.
However you classify it – intellectual curiosity, empathy, etc. – those with the highest degrees were more likely than others to say it’s important to understand the opinions of others. The measure, taken in 2004, shows that nearly 8 in 10 adults with advanced degrees and 73 percent with a bachelor’s degree said that having such an understanding was “very important.” About 65 percent in the high school graduate category agreed with that statement.
At every age and income level, the report shows that there’s some correlation between more education and better health. Those with a bachelor’s degree or higher most often reported being in “excellent” or “very good health,” according to a 2005 survey from the National Center for Health Statistics. That statistic is especially significant for the 65-and-older set, with 70 percent of college graduates falling into the above category vs. only 45 percent of high school graduates.
Graduates of a four-year college are also less likely to smoke than their peers. Of those 25 or above, roughly 25 percent of people whose educations stopped at high school smoke, compared with 10 percent of those who earned a bachelor’s degree or higher, according to the National Health Interview Survey. Only five percent of people listed as current smokers who are college graduates did not try to quit within a year of being interviewed for the survey, while 16 percent of high school graduates had not attempted to stop.
Those who finished college also reported being more active. In 2005, for instance, more than 60 percent who were in the 25-34 age range said they exercised “vigorously” at least once a week. That’s compared with 31 percent of high school graduates who said the same.
“The data does seem to be evidence that, controlling for other factors, having more education leads to better health decisions,” said Michael McPherson, president of the Spencer Foundation, a group that supports research about education. "Part of what’s going on in colleges is that students are thinking about themselves in a different way and thinking in terms of long-term goals.
“We tend to think of colleges as endowing particular skills, and this seems to show that students are getting a deeper knowledge,” he added. “We should pay attention to this, especially in an era when we pay so much attention to financial benefits.”
Still, McPherson agreed that academe needs to do a better job of understanding how, exactly, it helps change behavior. And, as the report makes clear, the correlation-causation issue is important to consider. In other words, it’s hard to tell how much of the disparity cited is a result of students completing four years of college or, say, simply a product of their background.
Morse said it’s logical to believe that there are factors other than educational attainment at play, such as if a student’s parents smoke. Baum, a Skidmore College economist and senior policy analyst at the College Board, said that while the statistics likely “inflate slightly” the importance of college in changing some behaviors, its role as change agent shouldn’t be discounted. (She also points out that while the report focuses on education benefits that can be quantified, there are many others that don’t fit into charts.)
As previously noted, “Education Pays” summarizes some recent – and hardly surprising – data on the financial benefits of earning a colleges degree. It says that after adjusting for inflation, the earnings of male college graduates are no higher now than they were in the early 1970s, and the earnings of female graduates have increased only moderately. But those with less than a college degree have also been a part of that trend.
And the gap between the earning potential of college graduates and high school graduations is only widening, the report notes. For instance, in 2005, a person with a professional degree could expect to make $100,000 a year, compared with less than $32,000 for a high school graduate and $51,000 for a graduate of a four-year college.
Over a lifetime, the expected typical earning of a four-year college graduate is $800,000 more than the expected earning of a high school graduate. If college graduates who also earn higher degrees are included, that lifetime earnings premium rises to more than $1 million. Among 25- to 34-year-olds, the earnings premium for college graduates is highest for Asian and Hispanic males. The premium is higher for black women than for women of other racial and ethnic groups.
The report also notes that the availability of employer-sponsored health benefits and pension plans increases with every level of education attained. More than two-thirds of full-time employees with at least a bachelor’s degree have access to pension plans, while only 53 percent of high school graduates have the same access. The level of participation in the available pension plans also increases as education level rises.
Responding to a question about some of the racial and socioeconomic disparities pointed out in the report, Baum said that colleges have done a much better job getting low-income and minority students into college than getting them through. That, the report says, should be a source of public policy concern.
“Our democracy will suffer if the only people who vote are white,” Morse said. “We’re moving toward a point where the voting pattern isn’t reflective of the population in general.””
That summary matches my understanding of that study, but isn’t that exactly what I said abov?. I guess that I still don’t understand the distinction you are trying to make between what I said about Dale & Krueger and what you are saying about Dale & Krueger. It seems like you are repeating what I thought I’d written earlier.
But it doesn’t matter. We can drop it since I don’t think it is that important to the main topic of this thread.
Studies like Dale and Krueger or Chetty are looking at individual benefit, not how many individuals get that benefit. So, like, if only one FGLI attended Fancy College, but that one FGLI got a great aid package and went on to have a successful professional class life, that sort of study would say that attending Fancy College appeared to be good for FGLIs.
These other sorts of measures are factoring in things like how many students are actually getting that benefit. So if Fancy College has 2000 students a class and only one FGLI a class, it will get a horrible score no matter how well that one FGLI does.
So one of the things this presentation of data is making clear is that while there may be some variation in how many Pell Grant students there are at different highly rejective colleges, none of them have nearly as many as, say, many regional/local public universities.
But they also do not appear to me to be doing a good job actually looking at the COA for low income students at these colleges. Like, if only 10-20% of the students get Pell Grants, and you are looking at the average COA across all 100% of students, you actually know you are NOT looking at the typical COA for Pell Grant recipients! So I really don’t see the point in using that as a factor in ratings like that, but they are doing it anyway, I guess because that is the easily available data.
For the record, the Chetty Study actually duplicated a lot of the D&K findings for most students, but was also able to identify some tail cases which departed from the D&K findings. This is an important refinement, but I think some people have failed to attend to the fact that most graduates are not going to be a tail case, they are going to be in the central distribution of cases.
“Some tail cases” makes it seem like a statistically insignificant afterthought.
The first line of the Chetty study: “Leadership positions in the U.S. are disproportionately held by graduates of a few highly selective private colleges.”
I encourage everyone to thoroughly read the study and decide for themselves.
That isn’t the Chetty paper trying to answer those questions. This is.
The reason I referenced D&K was that the results of the paper referenced by the OP seem counter to those of D&K. That paper gives relatively low scores to the schools D&K concluded would benefit FGLI students.
I don’t really see the conflict between “tail cases” and “leadership positions” if you understand the term “tail cases”, but I definitely agree that interested people should look carefully at their study and what it actually found.
As a social policy matter, they are concerned with the tail cases. But from a college choice perspective, people should understand the large majority of graduates of these colleges will not being getting the sort of positions they are concerned about.
The potential for upward mobility for a small but substantial fraction of kids, namely from lower-income backgrounds to upper-middle-income outcomes, is no small thing, of course. But this is happening alongside a lot of kids going from upper-middle-income backgrounds to upper-middle-income outcomes again, and then again a smaller but substantial fraction of kids going from true upper class backgrounds to upper class outcomes.
And then a few kids from upper-middle-income families join the upper class, but really very few. And then very, very few are going to go from lower-income backgrounds all the way to upper class outcomes.
But again, I don’t mean to suggest lower-income background people who end up with upper-middle-income outcomes are somehow not benefiting. That’s a big deal!
Edit:
By the way, it would also be a big deal (in a not so good way for the individual at least) if there was avoided DOWNWARD mobility. I think this is part of what is underlying all this–if you come from an upper-middle or true upper-class background, you probably do not need to go to an Ivy+ specifically to avoid downward mobility, but it probably does help to go to some sort of well-regarded private or public college.
So all these upper-middle-class parents caring about sending their kids to a “good college” are probably not wrong to care in the sense that while it probably will not launch their kid into the upper class, it could very well help their kids stay in the upper-middle-class.
The trick is when that family gets two good college offers, but one would cost a lot less than the other, and they have to figure out if the cost difference is worth it. And I think it remains true that for most such kids, the marginal difference is unlikely to be a good financial investment within a pretty wide range of colleges. It might pay off financially for a few, but very rarely. But the main point of paying the difference would have to be something besides simple financial return.
And it might be worth it on those other grounds, but I think that sort of conventional wisdom is in fact well-grounded in these studies.
This is probably major dependent. Engineering for example is very egalitarian right out of the gate. According to College Scorecard, median Mechanical Engineering earnings at 4 years are $97K for MIT, Cornell, CMU, and Cal Poly, but they are $94K for Wayne State, Kettering, and SJSU. No one would consider the latter “well regarded” even though they are all fine engineering programs.
… by employers of engineers more so than high school students and their parents. UCLA and CSULA civil engineering graduates have similar early career pay levels, but high school students intending to study civil engineering and their parents likely put UCLA far higher on the desirability scale than CSULA.
I think that is certainly true in the sorts of social circles where a lot of kids go to UCLA and such.
My reason for being cautious about talking about families in general is that lots of kids do in fact go to all the many other colleges besides the like of UCLA. In fact, totally random, but my Dad went to Wayne State, and I would personally still see it as well-regarded in Southeast Michigan.
Now, are there certain families in that area who would strongly prefer Michigan? Sure. Michigan State? Them too. But after that I think a lot of people see a bunch of Michigan publics as all pretty comparably good, including Wayne State. And for what it is worth, it is tied for #201 on the latest US News National Universities list.
So, on the one hand, I agree that in certain circles, there is tendency among some people to see universities like this, the ones not as famous as UCLA or Michigan or such, as “not good” or “not well regarded” or so on. But I am not so sure those people speak for families outside of those circles, the families who actually make up the vast majority of families sending kids to colleges.